Coleg Powys Moodle

A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a software system designed to facilitate teachers in the management of educational courses for their students, especially by helping teachers and learners with course administration. While often thought of as primarily tools for distance education, they are most often used to supplement the face-to-face classroom.

Components of these systems usually include templates for content pages, discussion forums, chat, quizzes and exercises such as multiple-choice, true/false and one-word-answer. Teachers fill in these templates and then release them for learners to use. New features in these systems include blogs and RSS. Services generally provided include access control, provision of e-learning content, communication tools, and administration of the user groups.

Such e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management System (LMS), Course Management System (CMS), Managed Learning Environment (MLE), Learning Support System (LSS) or Learning Platform (LP), it is education via computer-mediated communication (CMC) or Online Education.

In the United Kingdom and many European countries the terms VLE and MLE are favoured. Becta in the UK have coined the term LP to cover both MLE and VLE as used in the schools sector. In the United States, CMS and LMS are the more common terms, however LMS is more frequently associated with software for managing corporate training programs rather than courses in traditional education institutions.

(This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Virtual Learning Environment".)

The Coleg Powys Virtual Learning Environment makes use of the Open Source software, Moodle.