Physical appearance, tone of voice, inflection, humour, pauses in speech, volume - these are just some of the wealth of attributes that all have an impact on how your students see you, how they interact with you and most importantly, how they learn from you. When you take away the physical presence of the teacher (and therefore, all their valuable attributes), how effective is the teaching that's left? Does it not suffer?
My thoughts:
The VLE does not replace the teacher, it cannot just be somewhere you upload files/documents and it cannot teach your students for you. The role of the teacher is not diminished, it is perhaps even more crucial to establish the role of the teacher when using a VLE because of the fact that you are not physically there when your students are.
Therefore, I think it is vital to inject as much of your personality into your VLE as possible - and one way to do this, is be 'there' as far as technology will let you. To achieve this, I have been using audio on my VLE.
I know from personal experience that when I have missed a lesson and accessed the PowerPoint hand-out, simply reading the PowerPoint does not teach me anything. It does not help me catch up on a lesson and just reading through notes is not enough - I, and many others, benefit from hearing the speaker/deliverer of the lecture themselves. So I have added audio to my PowerPoint presentations when I can and I have embedded Podcasts where possible.
I found this useful website that discusses the use and importance of audio in learning, it also gives some advice on how to use audio.
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