From the early 2000s, a number of Academic programmes had commissioned the development of bespoke Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), supporting several Undergraduate and Masters level programmes. They provided a highly customised user experience with a strong sense of programme branding. In 2016 a significant organisational risk was identified as some of the technologies on which these custom VLEs were built were reaching end of life, they were based in a single hosting location, and they were not technologically resilient. Ongoing development was costly, they were maintained by Information Services on a best-efforts basis only and much of the administrative work to set up students and manage learning materials was manual. The VLE Consolidation programme was tasked with working with course teams to align them with the rest of the University in terms of learning design and technological support by migrating their courses to our centrally supported VLE, Blackboard Learn. Eight projects were set up with representation from Information Services Group (ISG) and Academic and Professional Services staff from each School/Deanery to oversee the migration. There was a significant training and communication element to these projects, as the bespoke VLEs had been used for many years and Blackboard Learn was a wholly different product. There was also some reliance on other bespoke services that had to be managed. Course content was migrated to Learn either by the course teams with assistance from ISG or fully by ISG. A small team of migration assistants was employed as some programmes had many thousands of pages of learning content and there were no automated migration tools available at that time. By August 2019, all programmes were using Blackboard Learn and the bespoke VLEs were decommissioned. This article was published on 2024-10-08
