Category: Learning Objects

BECTA Paper on ‘Open Source Teaching’ and the Kaleidoscope Learning Object Repository

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/
research/open_source_teaching.pdf

Likely you will have already seen reference to this paper in today’s OLDaily, but I felt it was worth reposting as it is a good paper and early on makes an important distinction that I think is too often left dormant in LOR projects and leads to no end of confusion about what people are trying to achieve.

This distinction has to do with the drivers behind the use of learning objects/repositories. The paper outlines 4:

– The efficiency route: the argument that learning objects and repositories enable scaleable reuse of materials and are thus a more efficient way to develop materials
– The teacher-centred route: sharing LOs will enable cross the board improvement of teaching materials
– The pupil-centred route: LOs, in that they also promote the separation of content and presentation and can be traversed to present new versions, enable accessibility and learning-style-centric versions of online materials
– The freedom argument: the LO approach allows instructors to take control of the means of production and share the intellectual product widely

more…
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OpalTree’s CADRiA

http://www.opaltree.com/

Early this week, BCcampus hosted an event to take a closer look at some of the open source course/learning management systems that are currently available and commence (or really continue) a province-wide dialog on the viability of implementing one and the issues surrounding such a project.

In the afternoon we were given a demo of OpalTree’s CADRiA system, out of Australia (what are they putting in the water down there!?! These folks seem to be simply bursting with innovation in the learning objects/elearning field!). In my mind the demo was actually a bit out of place in that particular day’s focus – when I think Course/LearningMS, I think more of delivery and tracking capabilities (of which CADRiA appears to lack many basic ones) instead of authoring, aggregation and searching capabilities (more à la LOR/LCMS, of which CADRiA had some simply mind bending qualities).

So if what you’re currently seeking is an LMS, I wouldn’t necessarily send you in this direction. But if you are involved with more of a learning content management/object repository-type issue, you’d do well to wade through their site, maybe look at their ‘demonstration’ flash movies, and see what they are doing. Read on for more…
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SCORM 2004 Photoshop Examples Version 1.0

http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?
fuseaction=DownFile&libid=641&bc=false

There’s likely to be a few posts circulating today on this as the ADL sent out a news release via its RSS feed to the effect that they were releasing a number of new items.

The ones in particular that were of interest to me are these example content packages – interesting because the collection illustrates a number of the different sequencing scenarios that can be addressed under the current ‘Simple Sequencing’ specification. In particular, I found the powerpoint presentation bundled at the root of the zip file (warning, it is about 11MB in total) to be helpful in laying out visually how these different scenarios unfolded. – SWL

Controlling your Language – Links to Metadata Vocabularies

http://www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/vocabs.html

In searching out existing controlled vocabularies for a project you could do far worse as a starting point than this extensive collection from the ‘Technical Advisory Service for Images,’ another JISC-funded service. Hats off to David Mattison for the pointer. – SWL

RSS Feeds from Repository Projects

http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?
folder=621267&since=9&Display=Display

Note what I mean here are the LOR projects (not the repositories themselves, which you can find over here) that are producing RSS feeds as a way to communicate about their projects or otherwise coordinate their efforts. These include:

– D’Arcy Norman’s Learning Commons Weblog (for the CAREO/APOLLO projects)
– The Resource Pool, a Eduspecs-funded test pilot of a CAREO implmentation
– R2R: Learning Design – a new initiative out of University of Calgary to implement a Learning Design tool

– APOLLO-DEV, the proper technical blog for the Apollo project at U of Calgary
– Stòr Cùram, a blog from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland on their LOR initiative, apparently employing Intrallect’s Intralibrary

I haven’t listed CogDogBlog in here, as Alan posts on so many other things beside the Maricopa Learning Exchange, but it’s certainly not because it doesn’t deserve attention. I expect I missed other’s as well, or maybe have you filed somewhere else in Bloglines but still cover your feed. If you are working on an LOR implementation or development project and running a blog, I’d love to hear about it, include it on this list and follow along.

And what, you ask, about my own project… embarassingly, I am so swamped trying to meet our initial project requirements phase deadlines that we haven’t created anything public to date, except this space here, which is not an official ‘organ’ of the project. Stay tuned for more news, though… – SWL

Professional Development Model & Resource Re-Use Scenarios from Flexible E-Content Project

http://www.fp.ucalgary.ca/maclachlan/
projectdiffusionintro.htm

For people either building new repository software or even figuring out what they need in implementing existing software, this might be of interest. Not quite a set of use cases, but maybe close – a set of scenarios which “attempt … to map the process that an educator might walk through to implement digital resources in classroom or online environments….
While the exemplars focus on K-12 learning, the Model and Workshop could apply to post-secondary instructors and designers as well. Developers may find the Case Examples informative in the development of flexible content tools.” – SWL

Joint IMS/CNI Whitepaper on interoperation between different types of ‘repositories’

http://www.imsglobal.org/
DLims_white_paper_publicdraft_1.pdf

I can only assume that the only reason someone didn’t point this paper out to me during my recent thrashing about concerning the difference between ‘institutional’ repositories and ‘learning object’ repositories is that, like me, they had never seen it before (or maybe you’re all just sadists and like to watch me flail about in public!)

Well in any case, hallelujah! This draft paper by Neil McLean and Clifford Lynch from June 28, 2003 is in my mind a model of clarity on the reasons for why these beasts are different (for one, the ‘transient’ versus ‘archival’ nature of their contents) but also why and how they need to interoperate.

Which is where I’ve landed on this topic – we need distinct types of repository software because they fill distinct end-user needs. But by implementing both common open protocols and using structured markup languages that can be mapped, we keep open the possibility of interoperating if and when this make sense. And I stress that last ‘if’ – the next piece in the puzzle I am waiting to see are convincing use cases, or even better yet convincing demonstrations, of search interfaces across catalogues of heterogeneous materials (e.g. records for books, ‘eprints’ and learning objects all at once) that don’t just confuse the matter entirely. – SWL

The Gateway to Educational Materials: An Evaluation Study (Year 4)

http://www.geminfo.org/Evaluation/Fitzgerald_03.06.pdf

Before there were ‘learning object repositories,’ educators were already trying to catalogue instructionally useful Internet resources in ‘subject-based catalogues’ or gateways. In the K-12 world, one of the more significant of these has been the Gateway to Educational Materials, or GEM. This report, from last June, evaluates the successfulness of the GEM project and provides some insight into what repository users might be looking for and problems they might face based on qualititative research done with 50 or so users. There’s nothing necessarily that revolutionary here, but it’s a good reminder to not re-invent the wheel and make mistakes that may already have been made before in similarly-motivated projects. Thanks to Solvig for pointing this out. – SWL

A Short Course on Structured Course Development, Learning Objects, and E-Learning Standards

http://careo.prn.bc.ca/losc/losccourse.html

From Gerry Paille and his team (a partnership of BC School District #60, Open School BC and the Open Learning Agency/BC Open Univeristy to develop a ‘CANCORE-compliant’ resource network that will house materials from some of their older resource collections) comes this useful 3 module course on “using a structured language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a basis for producing a learning design and describing course content, activities, and assignments.”

Gerry has also gone to the effort of packaging the course as an IMS 1.1.3 Content Package. Gerry notes on the project blog that the course has yet to receive a ‘technical review’ but is still quite worthwhile. One neat feature of how they implemented this is the ‘Module Resources’ links in each of the modules, which seem to be keyword searches to the backend CAREO database to provide related supplementary resources for each module. – SWL

Learning Object Repository *Software*

http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EdTechPost/
LearningObjectRepositorySoftware

There’s a lot of lists of learning object repositories around – to name but a few good ones, there’s

The problem, for me, with many of these lists is that these typically don’t make any distinction between instances of existing repositories that are hosted by specific institutions or consortia (‘collections’ if you will) and repository software projects – software that one can download and install in one’s own environment, and integrate with one’s own systems if that’s important to you.

Well it’s important to me for a variety of reasons – within the context of the BCcampus lor project we are definitely looking for software that we will run and host in BC, and in the context of the Edutools team we are looking at doing some work that will allow people to do a comparative analysis of this kind of software.

So to that end, the above URL points to an evolving list of packages one might consider if you had to implement a learning object repository. A few final notes on this list and my approach:

  • for the purposes of initially identifying as much as possible, I have included not only software that is specifically identified as LOR software, but also more commercial LCMS software, institutional repository software coming out of the library/archives world, and CMS software that implements either a repository or LCMS component
  • I have not made a huge distinction between learning object metadata repositories and learning object content repositories though I recognize there are crucial differences.

It’s a wiki page so feel free to add to it. It isn’t exhaustive when it comes to LCMS or institutional repositories, but I think there are strong cases to be made that these are different beasts, and that while either can be made to fill the LOR role, there may be good reasons not to do this. – SWL