Learning Objects: Approaches and Trends

“If good content were enough to support learning and human interaction were unnecessary, libraries would never have evolved into universities” (Wiley et al., 2004, p.511).

The definition of learning objects seem to be very broad: at one end of the spectrum, it is defined as virtually any (digital) item that may be (re)used for instructional purposes (e.g., lesson plan document, photo, sound recording); on the other end are complex systems that integrate entities, attributes and algorithms. However, some degree of re-useability seems to be an ideal goal of any learning object design. I think the digital part comes into play because making copies (hence re-useability) is so much easier than copying physical objects.

I must be a humanist because I found Wiley et al.'s article the most convincing – especially in their statement that “the majority of the value of educational experiences comes from the value added through interactions with human beings” (2004, p. 518). Although their definition was bit broad – “any digital resource which can be reused to mediate learning” (Wiley et al., 2004, p. 514), I thought their typology of learning object types made good sense:

• Fundamental – individual assets which cannot be meaningfully broken down further (e.g., images or PDF handout)
• Combined-closed – contain two or more fundamentals combined in a manner which precludes the simple reuse of the fundamentals (e.g., narrated presentation recording)
• Combined-open – contain two or more fundamentals combined in a way that does not preclude the simple reuse of the Fundamentals (e.g., images and text in a MS PowerPoint slide deck).

I also appreciated their discussion of the 're-useability paradox', since this is something my colleagues and I talk about often when creating instructional content online. Librarians all over the country teach very similar things (e.g., how to search the library catalog, how to find scholarly articles, evaluating resources, etc.) – but local differences, or 'how you do it here' aspects do matter – e.g., which databases your institution subscribes to, how to navigate your library website to get to the specific resources, etc. One way around this paradox is then to make learning objects general but build specific context around it – which is what we've tried to do with some of our 'big picture' videos.

What resonated the most about Merrill's article was his grounding in Gagne's work relating to guided practice, which I am a fan of. And although it seemed a bit overly technical to describe learning processes in terms of '13 instructional transactions', I thought he did provide an interesting approach to analyzing and designing methods for 'how to teach'. There were two aspects of his model I would like to try to apply to library related learning objects. One is his method of incorporating three levels of practice within the learning object:

Levels of Practice

• “Simon says” - do this, now do this, etc.
• “Do the next step” - start here, and you do what comes next
• “You do it” - you start

The second aspect is being able to provide different kinds of guidance options:


Guidance Options

• Explain – given an action, describe what happened and offer reasons why
• Predict – given a scenario or situation, determine what happens next
• Troubleshoot – after a fault is introduced, explain what happened and offer reasons why, offer alternative conditions or actions

I think a big challenge to Merrill's approach is the amount of programming required to create such a system – I have never written an algorithm and don't know where to start! I am also somewhat doubtful that his system would work as well for ill-structured environments as he implies.

Koppi et al's article didn't reveal many surprises: research faculty have little incentive to contribute to learning object repositories. One way that MERLOT seems to have approached their incentive and community building is by holding annual conferences, now in collaboration with SLOAN. While contributing learning objects may not (yet?) count towards tenure, I think conference contributions, or serving as a peer reviewer, are more closely aligned with the existing reward structure in academia.

Wiley et al, provided a nice summary of the two major trajectories in the work around learning objects:

“Commercial educational enterprises will continue to see value in the create once, sell for reuse many times economic model. Humanitarian educational enterprises will continue to see value in the ability to fund the development of one set of instructional materials and open these materials for reuse to individuals in developing nations and other spaces without additional costs.” (Wiley et al., 2004, p.519).

I wonder if a third approach would be to take an 'educational asset management' approach, as it seems with the NC Learning Object Repository - brief case studies are available from Equella (the partnering commercial software vendor).

References

Koppi, T., Bogle, L., Hodgson, N., & Lavitt, N. (2004). Institutional use of learning objects: Lessons learned andfuture directions. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 13(4), 449-463.

Merrill, M. D. (1999). Instructional transaction theory (ITT): Instructional design based on knowledge objects. In C.M. Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional design theories and models (2nd ed., pp. 397-424). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Wiley, D., Waters, S., Dawson, D., Lambert, B., Barclay, M., Wade, D., & Nelson, L. (2004). Overcoming thelimitations of learning objects. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 13(4), 507-521.

Cognitive Flexibility Theory, Literary Criticism and Reference Interviews

Cognitive flexibility theory (CFT) “is a constructivist learning paradigm which emphasizes real-world complexity and ill-structuredness of knowledge.” (Fitzgerald, Wilson & Semrau, 1997, p. 49). CFT was developed to serve as a more suitable means to approach advanced learning in complex and ill-structured domains, rather than introductory learning approaches that tend to over-simplify complex material and emphasize rote memorization (Jacobson & Spiro, 1995, p.303). These statements resonated with me because I'm always weary of developing training for adults that is better suited to developing skills in children or young adolescents.

Jacobson & Spiro (1995) offer 5 principles derived from CFT:

• Use multiple conceptual representations of knowledge (varied perspectives)
• Link and tailor abstract concepts to different case examples (crisscross themes and cases)
• Introduce domain complexity early
• Stress the interrelated and web-like nature of knowledge
• Encourage knowledge assembly (construct meaning) (p.303-304)

Fitzgerald et al suggest in more concrete terms that CFT may be applied in practice through the use of “authentic case scenarios, providing factual and procedural knowledge within the discipline, scaffolding the learner through guided activities, and modeling the reasoning processes of experts” (1997, p. 51)

Although both Jacobson and Fitzgerald emphasized hypertext and multimedia environments, CFT reminded me of my undergraduate studies in American Literature – which did not use hypertext, but merely printed texts – mind you by the end of the course my copies were always filled with sticky notes and cross-references. But the model was still pretty much the same – we discussed different themes and critical perspectives in class, and applied them across the texts selected for the course. I had a great professor who would introduce much of the themes and critical perspectives through provocative questions applied to the course texts – but eventually at the end of class or unit, she would offer her own (expert) perspective. This experience makes me think that cognitive flexibility theory would work well in literary studies. I also think it is a good match for reference work. While there are some aspects to reference questions that can be fairly well-structured, often reference interviews are required to figure out what exactly the patron needs and then figure out where to search for it. If anything, it seems that reference interactions have become much less-structured with an increase in the diversity of information formats, storage devices and retrieval tools. I'm less sure about how this applies to training students in finding, evaluating and using business information...

“The program resides on six floppy disks to enable easy distribution” (Fitzgerald, Wilson & Semrau, 1997, p.52)

This was my favorite line in the Fitzgerald et al. article. Despite some of the outdated aspects of the technologies used, I was impressed by the overall design of the program. I imagine such programs are not meant to be developed by teaching instructors but administered by them – I guess they are created by instructional technologists and I wonder what the industry standard is in terms of the turnaround for developing and implementing such a program. I think one of the key challenges will be to capture or access real-world examples in order to develop authentic cases. I guess you'd have to work closely with practitioners and institutions to obtain internal documentation. You'd also have to identify and interview experts to weigh in on the cases that are developed. Planning out branching scenarios and anticipating learner questions and preparing responses ahead of time are likely critical in delivering a successful learning experience.

References

Fitzgerald, G. E., Wilson, B., & Semrau, L. P. (1997). An interactive multimedia program to enhance teacher problem-solving skills based on cognitive flexibility theory: Design and outcomes. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 6(1), 47-76.

Jacobson, M. J., & Spiro. R. J. (1995). Hypertext learning environments, cognitive flexibility, and the transfer of complex knowledge: An empirical investigation. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 12 (4), 301-333.

Jacobson, M. J., Maouri, C., Mishra, P., & Kolar, C. (1996). Learning with hypertext learning environments: Theory, design, and research. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 5(3/4), 239-281.

Case-Based Reasoning Toward Skillful Practice

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a problem solving approach based on the idea that people draw on previous cases where similar problems and associated solutions were encountered, and that such experiences are captured in the form of stories (Wang et al., 2003).

The readings this week brought together a lot things that are related to my own work and interests. I love the idea of collecting stories from competent practitioners and using that for task analysis and developing mutlimedia content to help novices develop 'expert thinking'. This was the general idea behind the graduate student training module I'd developed last semester. In those interviews I'd asked each of my interviewees very simple, and exactly the same set of questions, to solicit

• information about themselves (name, role at libraries, extent of work experience),
• what customer service meant to them as it related to reference work; how this may differ in providing online reference services vs. in-person
• how they handle in-depth, difficult questions

Since the nature of reference work begins with a challenge or problem such general questions seemed to solicit stories that included strategies and lessons. In comparison to the simple line of questioning I'd used, Jonassen et al.'s recommendations for collecting stories from practitioners is much more problem focused and probing (2002):

• Identify skilled practitioners in the domain.
• Show the practitioners the problem for which you are seeking support.
• Ask the practitioners if they can remember any similar problems that they have solved – then work with the practitioner to
• Identify the problem goals and expectations
• Describe the context in which the problem occurred
• Describe the solution that was chosen
• Was it successful? Was it a failure? Why?
• Identify the points that each story makes
• Decide what the stories teach.

I would love to try some version of this in two subject domains. I'd already been thinking about doing interviews with business librarians in order to tap into their knowledge base, established over several years of practice. In fact one of my early writing submissions was a brief interview with a business librarian who'd recently retired and had been on Jeopardy!. The other domain is in the area of business – I would find it fascinating to interview technology start-up entrepreneurs, small business owners, financial market investors, and academics.

One of the challenges in developing, maintaining and curating a database of such content is keeping it fresh, and relevant. The libraries maintains a complex network of databases that require all sorts of planning, technical development, marketing and training support. Developing a repository of relevant and highly used content is no small project! Learning object repositories like M.E.R.L.O.T and A.N.T.S. come to mind – also proof that you need a pretty vibrant community around any repository for it to stay a live. Or, Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge site perhaps reminds us that prestige, adequate funds and contacts are important to consider when putting something like this together. Also, domains that deal with information technology evolve very quickly; however, I do agree with the adage that 'more things change the more the things stay the same', so I'm sure there are ways to draw lessons from the past about dealing with risk, uncertainty and compromise in new contexts – but it is likely to be tricky to pull off well.

In a previous post I'd mentioned using a Flip camcorder for conducting interviews with my colleagues – mostly in terms of the quality vs. learning curve. What I think is additionally useful to mention here is that the smallness of the camera made it much less obtrusive to film the conversation. I'd used a small tripod to place the camera on the table in between us, but angled it off to the side so that it was barely in their peripheral vision if they were addressing me with their responses to my question.

References

Jonassen, D. H., & Hernandez-Serrano, J. (2002). Case-based reasoning and instructional design: Using stories to support problem solving. Educational Technology Research & Development, 50(2), 65-77.

Wang, F. K., Moore, J.L., Wedman, J., & Shyu, C. R. (2003). Developing a case-based reasoning knowledge repository to support a learning community: An example from the technology integration community. Educational Technology Research and Development, 52(3), 45-62.

MOST Environments and Storytelling

MOST Environments (Multimedia environments that Organize and Support Text) was developed by the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CTGV) in order to help develop literacy in young children (Bransford et al., 1996). The approach used is to organize “instruction around visually rich, meaningful 'macrocontexts' that students and teachers can mutually share and explore” (Bransford et al, 1996, p. 223).

This model was interesting from a few different perspectives:

• It reminded me again of a staple assignment in grade school where we worked in groups to 'publish' a book, using coil binding with cardboard for covers and regular computer paper for the text pages. Today there are so many more sophisticated technologies that students could use to actually publish a pretty good quality bound volume – it seems to me that this assignment would be even more appealing to students. It made me wonder how students would react to the old-school version of the assignment – which I nevertheless enjoyed. 
• The use of the puppet was interesting for me from the perspective of teaching my own (future, hypothetical) children. But it made me somewhat doubtful whether any aspect of this approach could be applied to college learners.
• At a stretch, the idea of using multimedia delivery of information to support mental model building, may be one aspect that applies to college students. I've used concept mapping as a way to get at mental model building – I used it with a 300 level honors seminar class of students. The class was discussing the topic of peer review, and students were asked to map out their current understanding of how the peer review process worked (they'd had readings assigned on this topic for that day, though none of them necessarily explicitly explained this process in great detail). Then we watched the peer review in 5 minutes video, and then students were given a different colored pen to make any adjustments to their map. Many of the students made small revisions, but the kinds of revisions were different across students. The remainder of the class was used to discuss the readings in more detail. I've also had feedback from some of the writing instructors who have used some of our videos – they suggest that the stories seem to 'really stick' with their students, many of them referring back to the videos later in discussions further along in the semester.

In terms of possible tools – I recently re-discovered Aviary's fairly full suite of tools. Considering how expensive Adobe products can be, I think this is a great free resource, though I haven't used it very much yet. There also seem to be fairly good 'freemium' concept mapping tools available either online or for download.

Reference

Bransford, J.D., Sharp, D.M., Vye, N.J. Goldman, S.R., Hasselbring, T.S., Going, L., O’Banion, K., Livernois, J., Saul, E., with the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1996). MOST environments for accelerating literacy development. In S. Vosniadour, E. De Cort, R. Glaser, & H. Mandl (eds.), International Perspectives on the Design of Technolgoy-Supported Learning Environments (pp. 223-255)

Legacy Model Modified for Academic Literacy

The STAR Legacy Modules offer a great instructional design model, that allows for a range of instructors to implement it in flexible ways. (The somewhat strange sounding name, especially when used out of context,   comes from the software shell developed by CTGV and stands for "Software Technology for Action and Reflection where one of the actions is to leave a legacy" (Schwartz et al., 1999, p.189). The model consists of several phases that constitute an inquiry cycle, with increasingly challenging cycles building in succession, which is designed to allow learners to "progressively deepen their expertise" (Schwartz et al., 1999, p.189). The phases of each inquiry cycle include the following:

1. (Initial or successive) Problem or Challenge
2. Idea Generation (recalling prior knowledge)
3. Perspectives and Resources (new and/or expert information, practice, scaffolding)
4. Assessment (formative)
5. Wrap up (present best solutions, fed back into perspectives and resources for subsequent learners) (Schwartz et al., 1999).

This model just makes sense to me in ways that the preceding models somehow didn't quite - and these are the things that I think make it so great:

• It seems to be grounded in a natural cycle of how people learn new things or build on what they already know – except that it makes what are often very implicit meta-cognitive skills not only explicit but well-organized. I think Schwartz et al. stuck a very good balance in this design that is “flexibly adaptive rather than totally prescriptive or totally unstructured” (1999, p. 188)
• I also love that it offers a built in feedback loop to help refresh and evolve the instructional content. In this aspect, the model not only offers a design for instruction, but perhaps can be used to generate better solutions to persistent problems over time.
• It's great that the model acknowledges learners' prior knowledge and the importance of using that to provide context for their learning (instead of assuming that all learners start at the same place, from nothing). This phase also embeds the process of collecting pre-and post-test reslults in a way that is conducive to learning instead of as an extra step outside of the learning process for purely research or administrative reasons.
• Lastly, it provides relevant and expert resources in a way that they must be explored by the learner and worked in with their existing knowledge towards a specific goal – which is a process that is more similar to how problems are addressed in the real world (except that you usually have to build up and maintain your own pool of expert contacts and resources). What I think is a great strength in the thinking behind the model, that is also key to offering flexibility, is that the resources are not there to 'give away' solutions but rather “point toward relevant domains of inquiry” (p.199), regardless of which domain that may be.

All of these qualities are very important for the kind of instruction that I do. It is often a challenge to effectively assess student learning or their skill levels since they come from such diverse academic backgrounds. The Libraries are also in a position of unique perspective in that we work with researchers, students and staff across disciplines and across the range of years they are at NC State. I'm always thinking of ways to make the most of this this unique position and I'm hoping that I can do some of that through the flexible and legacy aspects of this model. I'm hoping to explore the possibilities in a concrete way for the third module assignment for this course – that is, develop a prototype for helping students learn academic research skills using this model. Here is a possible outline of how this might work in one or two inquiry cycles:

Cycle 1

Initial Problem or Challenge:

• Research paper assignment for an ENG 101 course.

Idea Generation (recalling prior knowledge):

• Consider previous experiences (e.g., approaches taken with assignments from high school).
• Strategies for approaching this assignment.
• Possible contacts for help or advice.

Perspectives and Resources (new and/or expert information, practice, scaffolding):

• Online orientation to using the Libraries website for research papers.
• Video tutorials on using Summon, library catalog, print resources.
• Academic writing and references
• Citation management tools

Assessment (formative):

• Paper outline
• Annotated resource list

Wrap up:

• Reflect on most challenging aspect of the process and how it was managed

Cycle 2

Initial Problem or Challenge:

• Company analysis report for a 300 level professional writing course.

Idea Generation (recalling prior knowledge):

• Consider previous experiences (e.g., approaches taken with ENG 101 assignments).
• Strategies for approaching this assignment.
• Possible contacts for help or advice.

Perspectives and Resources (new and/or expert information, practice, scaffolding):

• Sources of company information.
• Business writing guides.
• APA citation guide for business sources.

Assessment (formative):

• Report outline
• Annotated resource list

Wrap up:

• Reflect on most challenging aspect of the process and how it was managed

One challenge will be to think about how such a module may be used either within or outside of course contexts, and being able to administer each cycle in a scalable way. Also, a significant adjustment to the model is that there is limited control over how the students may move through the two cycles. That is, although most freshmen take ENG 101 in their freshmen year, some take it later or not at all. Also, given the large number of sections for either ENG 101 and the professional writing classes (thousands of students take these each year) some sections may use these modules while others use a different approach.

Another, second idea:

Initial Problem or Challenge:

• You are a technology start up and are entering a local New Venture Fund Competition. Submissions require a well-researched business plan. What sources can you use to inform your business plans?

Idea Generation (recalling prior knowledge):

• Consider previous work experience
• Possible contacts
• Resources at hand

Perspectives and Resources (new and/or expert information, practice, scaffolding):

• Business research basics video
• Successful entrepreneur tips (a/v?)
• Annotated resource list

Assessment (formative):

• Annotated resource list

Wrap up:

• Reflect on most challenging aspect of the process and how they managed it as a group.
• Final recommended resource list
• Video with three points of advice

The second cycle in this case would be actually starting to draft the plan, talk to potential customers and prototype products/services - which would be beyond my expertise.

References

Schwartz, D., Lin, X., Brophy, S., & Bransford, J.D. (1999). Toward the development of flexibly adaptive instructional designs. Instructional-design theories and models, 2, 183-214.

Anchored in Context

Anchored instruction is based on the frameworks of situated cognition and aims to create an environment in which learning can take place through sustained exploration of problems in 'authentic' contexts (CTGV, 1992). Such contexts are presented in the form of stories in order to manage the complexity of the problem to be solved, as well as the information resources for solving the problem. Given that true apprenticeship is not always scalable to meet the needs of large groups of learners, this approach aims to create situations that help to simulate the learning contexts of apprenticeship, and therefore the benefits associated with it. The model involves a number of different steps but the basic stages may be outlined in the following way:

• Engage with a specific scenario in the form of a story, and explore the details of that story.
• Present a problem within the context of the story.
• Invite learners to use the information that has been provided through the story to solve the problem, reviewing the details of the available information as necessary.
• Students are encouraged to work in groups.
• Students may received expert feedback regarding solutions to the problem.

I like the idea of creating an environment for learning to take place, since I have always thought that you can't ever determine when learning will take place for a student. You can deliver material, provide feedback and pace out the process through the academic calendar, but individual students ultimately have to set aside time to make meaningful connections through all the resources, assignments and problem sets that they must plow through in a given semester. I also thought that the idea of 'inert knowledge' vs. 'spontaneous use of information' was interesting and in many ways very true. It made me wonder if it weren't the case that in an effort to be efficient at developing knowledge, the trade-off has been creating lots of inert knowledge at the cost of inadequately developing the ability to spontaneously make use of any any accessible knowledge. I think a strength of the anchor model is this aim to help train students to “use knowledge as tools” instead of an “arbitrary sets of procedures or facts” (CTGV, 1992, p.247).

Even though the authors opposed using 'contrived situations' in favor of 'authentic life scenarios' – I thought that their scenarios were actually quite contrived. In some ways I think entirely fantastic scenarios that still required real life problem solving would be better than inadequately authentic scenarios. At one point one of the articles mentioned providing an encyclopedia of information and that made me think of a Nintendo game I used to play with my brother as a kid called, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? It even came with a mini encyclopedia!

Given the quality of immersive video gaming environments now available, I think it would be quite expensive to develop multimedia contexts that could compete. It seems that (passable quality) animation in general is quite expensive to produce – especially if the goal is to create sustained interactions. I don't know how attractive this kind of approach would be for adult learners – it seems more appropriate for younger students? I think libraries have begun to create some pretty good videos with some animation explaining concepts and offering advice - a good example is this one by Peabody Library at Vanderbilt:

Perhaps one way to take these production a step further will be to apply some of the aspects of anchored instruction? This made me think about what animation tools were available and here are some I found.

References

Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CTGV). (1992). Anchored instruction in science and mathematics: Theoretical basis, developmental projects, and initial research findings. In R. A. Duschl, & R. J. Hamilton (Eds.), Philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and educational theory and practice (pp.244-273). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

4th Annual Hexapod Haiku 2011 - Under Age 13 Category

Just wanted to let folks know that NC State's 4th Annual Hexapod Haiku poetry contest is accepting submissions. There is a special category for submissions by children under age 13 - which I thought might be of interest to some of you who teach young children.

I've helped judge for the past 3 years and some of our favorites have been the under 13 submissions, which were often accompanied by hand-drawn pictures - here is an example of a runner-up from a poet under age 13 from 2010.

More info about the contest and submissions here:
http://insectmuseum.org/haiku.php