Presence, emergence and knowledge objects: user interaction in a virtual learning environment

How do students study with webcasts? How do the new media change their ways of learning? How can video, sound, multimedia and text be combined optimally to produce a learning environment that is attractive, stylish, and productive of deep learning, for students, trainees and practitioners? In this report we focus on the interim results from a long-term project tracking student use of a VLE. We shall demonstrate briefly the functionality of the environment, then summarise the extensive user data we have gathered. In more detail, we shall analyse the responses of users to the splicing of video and text. Our findings verify a number of approaches to learning advocated by the phenomenographical literature, and we shall summarise this. Throughout, we offer practical guidelines to the use of webcasts in VLEs, and discuss the extent to which such environments can be used in legal education and training.