The Irish inter-institutional virtual learning environments (VLEs) open dataset stems from ongoing work with a rolling longitudinal survey of students' usage of VLEs which has been ongoing in 12 higher education institutions since 2008. The project has collected over 21 000 student responses to date through the growth of an extended network of educational technologists collaborating from multiple institutions. The survey instrument uses a common set of questions, and on condition of anonymity, the participating institutions pool their data to compare and contrast the results. The large representation of the data collected at national level opens the possibility of international participation to add a cross-national dimension to the data analysis.