You are right about MS live@edu or hosted Sharepoint – I think it doesnot matter which Cloud service you take, it should be right for the institution.

I have not used MS live@edu or Sharepoint, I guess it gives students more control that a traditional VLE right?
Likewise can the same be said for staff?

CLEs, in my opinion, provide more control to students and staff than VLEs.

Manish
(we met at ALTC this year)

With My Sites, those institutions that are using SharePoint as a portal have actively promoted My Sites, because the My Site provides the student with their entry point via single sign on to other systems in the institution, and with personalised content. At Plymouth you have actively promoted My SItes which I presume provide students with their route into the VLE. But those HEIs that are using SharePoint for team collaboration and/or for an intranet have tended not to actively promote My Sites, partly I think because My Sites are not central to achieving the goals of their implementations. A couple of HEIs who use SharePoint for team collaboration and make My Sites available to both staff and students (but without active promotion) reported take up rates of 1 in 10 by staff and students of their My Sites. One HEI told me ‘hardly any students’ had activated their My Site.

One option I think you miss in the point on Google Apps is the similar hosted services MS will offer based arround live@edu and hosted Sharepoint services too. This could be an attractive option having the benefits of outsourcing and the richer functionality of Sharepoint then.

Having read about the developments in Sharepoint 2010, I can’t wait to see that implemented at UoP as so many of the improvements directly address the shortfalls identified in it’s use for T&L it seems to me. However I’m wary of how difficult the migration may be with all the customized web parts etc developed inhouse to support T&L. I’m not involved with the team who will have that headache but I’m hoping it’s not as bad as I fear.

The Cloud gives control to people on their documents/work etc, it makes them publishers/authours/broadcasters etc. A spin of sharing and collaborative working added to the mix and we have what I call as the Cloud Learning environment. Here the control is shared between the learner and the facilitator or the academics .

This is new, as the old institutional VLE (or virtual learning environments, kept most of the control with the institutions or the academics) and the PLEs (personal learning environments) did not quite provide a cohesive platform to bring different people together form different walks of life uniformly.

To read more about a CLE, see http://edublend.blogspot.com/2009/12/cloud-learning-environment-what-it-is.html