About Us

​Mission Statement​

The BLE (Bloomsbury Learning Exchange)
  • is committed to innovating learning and teaching by sharing good practice in Technology Enhanced Learning.
  • supports its partners by providing cost efficiencies, which are achieved by negotiating with software suppliers and sharing economies of scale.
  • aims to work collaboratively, developing new and exciting ways of teaching and learning that would otherwise be difficult for the partners to achieve alone (the whole being greater than the sum of its parts).
History
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The BLE collaboration was established by LSHTM (the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), the RVC (Royal Veterinary College) and SOAS (the School of Oriental & African Studies) in 2004, and was joined in 2005 by the IOE (now known as the UCL Institute of Education), Birkbeck in 2007, and the University of London in 2015. The function of the BLE is to provide mutual benefits, including shared technical support, pedagogical expertise, cost efficiencies on licence fees and collaborative funding opportunities. The BLE partners also share costs for remote hosting of the learning platform Moodle, freeing up dependency on IT infrastructures and support internally. Each partner has its own unique Moodle site but they are managed under a common licence.
BLE Annual Report 2014-15.pdf
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Service
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Over the past 14 years, the BLE Service has grown and developed into a wider digital education service, enabling the partners to profit from cost savings of joint licences, and to enhance digital education practices by sharing and coordinating technical and pedagogical expertise. During this time, the partnership has also been awarded external grants from funding bodies to extend the impact that digital education can provide. Working together as a consortium enables the BLE partners to develop training materials and provide shared expertise and support that they might otherwise be unable to offer individually.

The BLE portfolio of shared technologies includes the following:
  1. Moodle (Virtual Learning Environment)
  2. Learning Objects (a third-party provider of various web 2.0 tools including blogs and wikis)
  3. Blackboard Collaborate (web conferencing software)
  4. Lecture capture software (Echo360 and Panopto)
  5. Turnitin (online plagiarism detection software)
  6. Bloomsbury Media Cloud (digital media repository).
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All of these technologies complement and integrate with Moodle, although some partners can opt to use them as stand-alone tools as well.

A number of BLE Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) events and special interest groups are organised for the partners to facilitate the sharing of good practice, staff development and support of technological tools.