Category: Learning Objects

Correction – NO New Round of B.C. Online Program Development Funding Announced

http://www2.news.gov.bc.ca/news_releases_2005-2009/
2005AE0065-000834.htm

This is mostly of interest to any B.C. readers (and even they will probably hear about through the normal channels) but one of my employers, BCcampus, has just announced another round of funding through the Online Program Development Fund.

Well, just goes to show you you should never trust news releases. I’ve just been informed that this news release dated September 19 is actually referring to the last round of funding that was first announced in late 2004, that it took a year for the press release to come out, and that no new round has been announced. Boy, do I feel stupid!! I think they call this ‘premature blogulation’ – SWL

ConceptTutor

http://engage.doit.wisc.edu/tools/ConceptTutor/

From a reference in the Tools Interoperability demonstrator I mentioned yesterday came a link to this tool, ConceptTutor, built by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Released under what looks to be an open source license (the source code is available here) it seems to be a glossary tool on steriods, with a structured approach to illustrating concepts and minimally assess the learner’s understanding of those that can be used to annotate and supplement core course content. The application apparently produces Accessible content and can draw content from repositories like Fedora (this I could not confirm), which makes it an interesting tool for re-using ‘learning objects’ in a way that perhaps retains some of the original connotation of the term and focuses it on the right level of granularity. It’s not clear the extent to which this tool can now be shown to practically interoperate and annotate content within existing CMS like WebCT, or Sakai, but presumably if that is not already present as part of the demonstrator it will be something being targeted soon. – SWL

BCcampus selects The Learning Edge to power repository

http://www.bccampus.ca/Page514.aspx

Early this year we went (back) out to RFP for software to power a ‘learning object repository’ for BCcampus. OpenSchool BC and the Alberta Online Consortium, both from the K-12 world, were also partners in the RFP.

In May we reached a decision to go with The Learning Edge, an LCMS product from Australia. There were many good proposals, but overall we were very impressed with the maturity of the solution (which given the history became increasingly important), its support of standards, and its interoperation with existing repositories and CMS (all of WebCT, Blackboard and Moodle are supported out of the box). It also comes with a Java-based WYSIWYG editor, which has the potential to greatly assist with re-contextualizing and re-using content from the repository, though in the multi-institutional settings all three organizations inhabit we are cautious about how much uptake of that tool we will see.

Really, though, the fun has just begun; we are now proceeding to get our instance up and running and configured. The challenge isn’t the software – that’s also one of its real strengths, a very powerful administrative interface – the challenge is the process pieces, workflows, schemas, etc. We aren’t starting from scratch, much of the work we did last year will still apply, but I’m also not expecting to get it perfect on the first try. Part of the trick will be devising a reasonable change management process that allows us to innovate some of the interface and logic while still fostering user adoption and familiarity. Wish me luck! We are aiming to open the doors in October, though my expectation is for a ‘soft launch’ that slowly grows. – SWL

Executing Learning Objects, Resurrecting Sharing and Reuse

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/LO_gunshots/
lo_gunshots.html

I was fortunate to instigate a workshop last week as part of the BC Educational Technology Users Group spring workshops in Merritt, B.C. The workshop was on “Practical Tips for Reusability and Interoperability.” In keeping with themes I laid out earlier on this weblog, I began the session with a formal execution of the term “learning object” which you can see at the link above (feel free to reuse this – maybe if it’s played enough times the term will finally die off). (more…)
Continue reading “Executing Learning Objects, Resurrecting Sharing and Reuse”

FLOSSE Posse – Is the “Learning Objects” King Naked?

http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=
learning-objects-is-the-king-naked

<rant> Over on on the Flosse Posse weblog, Teemu Leinonen has posted a bit of a rant on the term “learning object.” I’m glad someone stepped up and said it. I agree, let’s kill off the word “learning object” and while we are at it, let’s throw “learning object repository” on the funeral pyre too. Both of these terms have led us thoroughly astray. “Learning Object” for their implication of some magical plug-and-play learnability that we’re discovering is mostly folly, and “learning object repositories” for the mistaken emphasis of the word “repository” on the container at the sake of the users and re-users and re-use, ultimately what I thought the motivation behind the whole idea was.

But my small fear is that in throwing out these terms, we’ll also throw out many of the problems they were supposed to be trying to solve – namely enabling learning content to be shared and found through means that were otherwise unavailable (e.g. searching on pedagogically useful terms that were either not directly part of the resources themselves, or else for resources that weren’t served well by conventional web search engines), and having formats for learning content that allowed it to be reused by as many systems as possible without major alterations (there are many more problems they were supposed to address, I know, but let’s leave it at that for now). I absolutely agree that the terms have gotten in the way, and have led us to propose solutions which seem to have forgotten some of the initial problems they were supposed to be solving. Actually, in the case of both “learning objects” and “LORs,” part of the issue for higher ed has been IMO in higher ed’s appropriation of the terms; we’ve assumed the terminology, but we’ve tried to change the underlying problems they were originally intended to address to suit the needs and culture of higher ed, and we haven’t done enough critical examination of the baggage underpinning the terms and original ideas to understand why this isn’t working).

So, firing squad, guillotine, maybe lethal injection as we’re now so civilized; I don’t care, but let’s move on from these terms and the 5 years (at least) of false starts that are associated with them. We likely couldn’t be moving on without having made these mistakes, but once made, repeating them over and over doesn’t suddenly make them right. </rant> – SWL

Report Assessing the Learning Objects, Models and Frameworks Developed by The Le@rning Federation

http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/tlf2/sitefiles/
assets/docs/muirhead_haughey_0105.pdf

Someone brought up this report by two Canadians, Bill Muirhead and Margret Haughey, to me on a phone call yesterday, and try as I might I couldn’t remember having read it when it came out this past January. A subsequent google and search of blogs similarly found no mention, which surprise me considering how detailed and important a report it seems to be.

Commissioned by the Australian-based Le@rning Federation, the report folows up on an earlier 2003 report by the same authors that reviewed The Le@rning Federation’s progress with developing and spurring adoption of learning objects in the Australian (and New Zealand, I think) K-12 systems. Post-secondary folks should also pay attention though, as part of the benefit in the report is its fairly extensive review of the literature and current thinking around learning objects. At 93 pages it’s a bit of a read (though even just reading the Executive Overview is well worth it) but for me it represented one of the better anaylses of the state of play of learning objects that I’ve seen of late. – SWL

ADL Plugfest 9 Proceedings Available, Some Notable Presentations

http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=PF9ProceedT

The proceedings for the 9th ADL Plugfest are now available, including both online video, links to the powerpoints and to some demos.

As if the point needed more illustration, nothing quite exemplifies the differences between the training/corporate elearning communities and the higher ed community, or between the state of the advanced research community and the state of actual practice in the field, (or between the military and everyone else), as does looking through proceedings such as these. I almost get whiplash from the contrast between some of my current conversations in higher ed (where the boutique model of production is so entrenched I sometimes get push back at the notion of an instructor wanting to re-use any content, at all) and this, where orderly lines of SMEs and instructional designers are expected to crank out content based on specific processes, protocols and procedures, yes sir!

Still, lot of potential interest here – from the Wednesday sessions, one can find a presentation on “XML Content Formats for SCORM” from a number of luminaries, including Canada’s own Roger St-Pierre from the DND, and John Townsend, head of HarvestRoad. It is interesting to see where folks such as these have got in practice with using XML for content markup (not just metadata) and then subsequently displaying it in multiple formats. As Stephen Forth points out in the question period, the control that, say Boeing, can exert on its content production model seems like a luxury to many of us. Townsend’s ‘devil advocate’ comments in his part of the presentation (especially the comparison of higher ed to being ‘near anarchy’ in its production models) was especially appreciated by me.

Another notable presentation was from Rob Ferrell of IBM who presented on IBM’s efforts on the “Dynamic Assembly of Learning Objects.” Ostensibly, if you go back far enough, this was one of the early motivations for the notion of learning objects, at least in the training communities. Interesting to see working code and architecture of how this can work in practice. Not sure that I’m convinced all of the obstacles to this happening regularly can be overcome, but clearly it’s not just a theory any more.

Finally, also of note for being a lone voice in the wilderness of this mechanized view of learning is David Wiley’s keynote to the ‘Working on Simple Sequencing and Navigation’ thread within the Plugfest. David makes the important point that things like SCORM don’t solve all the problems – they help with things like interoperability, and are necessary constraints that instructional designers must work within, but at the end of the day the fact that an object validates as a SCORM package does not mean it is effective learning (or reusable!)

Anyways, lots of stuff to ponder here. Happy viewing! – SWL

ELATED – Front End to Fedora

http://elated.sourceforge.net/

Seeming to prove out the model of ‘repository as service’ is this front end to the Fedora repository system. And also seeming to provide a good example to back up Charlie Lowe’s recent point on how open source can itself provide learning opportuniites within educational institutions, this was built as part of the Associated Colleges of the South Technology Center’s Software Engineering Internship.

Interestingerrr and interestingerrr… – SWL

“Learning Objects and Instruction Components” – IFETS Formal Discussion Summary from February 2000

http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_2_2000/
discuss_summary_0200.html

That’s right, you read the title of the post right, from February 2000. So what am I doing posting this 5 year old discussion summary from the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society discussions. Have a read yourself and decide – depending on what frame of reference you choose, 5 years can be a very long time or the blink of an eye. So reading this may seem like proof of how far we’ve come, or how many times our wheels have spun round.

Must … drink coffee … smell flowers … take medication … [and to think, Victoria’s had one of its least rainy springs in years] 😉 – SWL

BECTA’s Packaging and Publishing LOs: Best Practice Guidelines

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/industry/
content_packaging.pdf

This new guide from Becta gives the grand tour through most of the relevant learning object related standards, and contains a few useful starting points, for instance the “Packaging and publishing checklist.”

The document rightly points out that “because content packaging is both a descriptive and mapping discipline, as well as a technical practice, it is recommended that it is addressed as a key process during the development of the learning object itself, from start to finish, rather than something that is performed once the object has been completed.”

Good advice it would seem, but what’s frustrating about documents like this and its ilk is that the various standards and specifications are presented to users as something to be concerned about outside of the context of specific content development tools and practices. This is not totally their fault – while others may argue differently, I think it fair to say that there’s neither an overwhelming array of good development tools which support this standards-based vision, nor well documented (or well practiced) instructional design processes that marry reusability with learning effectiveness as dual goals of the content creation process. In my mind, until both of these are addressed, resuability (and to some extent the lesser challenge of interoperability) will be things that remain at best tacked on at the end of the development process, and likely by only the more sophisticated professional developers. – SWL