ABSTRACT
One of the most powerful, and often overlooked, affordances of digital technology is ability to record, copy and edit data sets, from a word-processed document to a digital video, with an ease that is unmatched in equivalent non-digital media. The outcomes of adoption of virtual learning environment (VLE) use in university sector offer useful lessons on avoiding the pitfalls in the adoption of collaborative learning environments in schools. Contemporary VLEs are key element of apparent explosion of the massive open online course (mooc), a new development that has been sweeping the global higher education space in the first decades of the twenty-first century. If the only purpose of formal learning is to pass externally set tests, learner has no responsibility for or ownership of their learning for its own sake- the experience lacks personal authenticity. Ideally the system also integrates with the management information system (MIS) so that learner records can be kept centrally and matched to their performance data.
