Digital learning environment

Digital learning environment explained

Digital learning environments provide teachers and students with quick and easy access to information and materials for hybrid education. This form of education is becoming increasingly important. SURF wants to work with institutions to see how digital learning environments can be best implemented in education.

What challenges do institutions face?

The digital learning environment is a coherent set of services and applications that support teachers and students in the learning process and teaching. Institutions face the challenge of organising the digital learning environment to accommodate the wishes and requirements of lecturers and students, to make it accessible to all, easy to use, personal and personalised.

Challenges include:

How do you form a vision for the digital learning environment?
How do you set up a digital learning environment?
What technology do you need for a digital learning environment?
What should you pay attention to when buying modules?
How can you develop the digital learning environment further?

Together with institutions and suppliers, SURF investigated what a modular learning environment could look like in practice and what is needed to realise it: both in terms of technology and organisation. Since 2020, SURF has also been investigating activities in the field of open standards and interoperability. Examples include the active co-development of standards in an IMS context, testing interchangeability and integration in the DLO test environment and challenging market parties to actually use those standards. The challenges are explained in more detail below.

Digital learning environment vision

Students and instructors have ever-changing needs when it comes to using tools in education. An institution must be able to respond flexibly to this with its digital learning environment. How do you form a vision of the digital learning environment? And how do you keep it future-proof? SURF gave continuous attention to the digital learning environment of higher education institutions over the last decade in order to formulate a vision for this. SURF did this together with 30 experts, using various working methods.

Design of digital learning environment

Education is becoming increasingly flexible. Many institutions are running up against the limits of their current systems and internal processes. After all, they are not set up to support flexible educational processes. How do you design a digital learning environment that supports personal and flexible education? And how, as an institution, do you then translate the educational vision into the design of the digital learning environment?

Digital learning environment technology

The digital learning environment of the future is not an all-in-one solution, but appears to be a coherent whole of various services and applications that flexibly support students and instructors in the learning process and teaching and matches their needs. What technology do you need for a digital learning environment? You can think about open standards and various modular components that play a role in the digital learning environment.

Procurement digital learning environment

Procurement law often plays a role when purchasing components of the digital learning environment. What should you pay attention to when purchasing modules? SURF conducted research into the procurement of components for the digital learning environment.

Continued development of the digital learning environment

A digital learning environment is never finished: it requires continuous attention to improvement. How can you further develop the digital learning environment? With the project Collaboration Platform Educational Applications SURF looked at a joint solution for sharing information on applications via a platform. SURF also investigated how to improve the user experience of a digital learning environment