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.