Tag: Learning Objects

EASE History Campaign Ads

http://www.easehistory.org

One thing I love about publishing this blog is that (along with all the spam) it brings in scores of unsolicited pointers to really great educational resources.

The latest one, sent in by Aparna Ramchandran, points to an amazingly timely site from Michigan State University that allows students to learn about US history, presidential elections and issues through the prism of their campaign ads. The campaign ad viewer’s interface is incredibly intuitive and the site also provides a learning guide with a number of suggested activities and questions. Highly recommended – only wish more US voters would take the time to study these in the next 7 days, it’s not hard to see the patterns repeating. – SWL

Developing a university course for on-line delivery based on learning objects: From ideals to compromises

http://www.athabascau.ca/schoolnetProject04/
documents/LOB_Final_DraftWilhelm-Wilde3.pdf

I’ve been searching for this paper without being sure it existed – “Two course developers … investigated and described from their personal points of view the complex and immediate challenges they faced as they designed an online university course based on learning objects.”

Somewhat disappointingly, they ultimately “acquired a ‘ready-made’ commercial website featuring learning objects and electronic material embedded in a comprehensive course website.” Still, this paper lays out the details of what appears to be quite a straightforward attempt to create a new online course by finding and assembling resources. The authors are clearly not evangelists for the LO approach, and make clear a number of its current shortcomings and difficulties.

We desperately need more stories like these, as well as far more serious work on what a real ‘learning object design approach’ to create new curriculum out of existing materials might look like (instead of more pie in the sky ‘automated assembly of instructional materials’ scenarios, please!). One of a number of interesting papers from Athabasca University that resulted from their participation in the SchoolNet Project ‘Learning Objects in a Box’ – SWL

LODA (Learning Object Design Assistant): a job aid for instructional designers created by Clive Shepherd

http://www.aboveandbeyond.ltd.uk/products/loda.htm

I’m wondering if anyone has any experience with this package and would care to comment on its usefulness. In general, I am on the hunt for resources that might help instructors grapple with the issue of how to develop both re-usable (e.g. re-purposable in different instructional contexts) and interoperable (e.g. usable in different technical delivery environments) learning objects. If you know of other resources that might be useful, I’d be grateful for the reference , either in the comments area or on this wiki page – SWL

Reusable Learning site from NSDL/Eduworks

http://www.reusablelearning.org/index.asp?id=26

Based on a reference in a recent intro to learning objects I went back to a site I thought I new, but instead found this newly developed resource that the Eduworks folks produced for the NSDL. It is really worth spending some time on, for both newbies and old hands alike. The section on “Fostering Reusability in the NSDL” is very helpful, and the Reusability Framework is, I think, top notch and I would be surprised if I didn’t start to see it show up more as a canonical reference. – SWL

Training and Resources for Assembling Interactive Learning Systems

http://www.trails-project.org/

This NSF-funded project in the States just makes so much sense – have the univeristy students currently studying to be educational designers and developers work on actual learning content for the K-12 system. As the site says, “Through these courses TRAILS intends to have three major effects: to better prepare tomorrow’s designers of educational tools, to better prepare the teachers who will use such tools, and—by publishing select course projects— to generate new tools for K-12 education.” Obvious? Maybe. Innovative. Seems to me, definitely! – SWL

ALOHA II

http://aloha2.netera.ca/

New site for the release of Aloha II, the reworked metadata editor/content packager from the University of Calgary, which is now based on the RELOAD tool from the U.K. The version available right now is an alpha release – no news on their news page (and no RSS feed!) about when to expect beta or gold releases, but hopefully things are moving along swimmingly. – SWL

Finding Learning Objects – Walking the Talk

Can our intrepid search find a learning object in time to figure out how to calculate ‘Z-scores’? Tune in and find out!

Today (like many days) I was faced with a task I was not 100% sure how to do. I had a set of ratings for different evaluators, and had been told by someone who knew better than I that I should be trying to calculate their ‘z-scores’ in order to standardize the numbers.

As I was about to enter a handy-dandy Google search, I thought – “no wait! Why don’t you see if there are any ‘learning objects’ out there that could teach you what a Z-score is, and how to calculate it.” So I set out in search of my closest learning object repository to see what I could find.
Continue reading “Finding Learning Objects – Walking the Talk”

Presentations from the Digital Library Forum Spring Forum 2004

http://www.diglib.org/forums/Spring2004/
springforum04abs.htm

Thanks to Dr. Tom Carey for passing on the reference to the presentation archive for the DLF’s 2004 Spring Forum. There’s lots of interest here; in particular, one of the 9.00am-10.30am sessions from April 21, titled “Digital Repository Interoperability with Learning Systems” gives some insight into how the library/archives world is approaching the issue of interoperating with various learning systems, notable not only CMS are mentioned but also weblogs! (Ironically, for all of the focus on metadata, this page itself is unstructured HTML, hence my lack of ability to point you directly to the section containing this presentation’s references). – SWL

FEDORA Wiki – FedoraImplementations

http://www.fedora.info/wiki/bin/
view/Fedora/FedoraImplementations

According to this list on the Fedora Wiki site, last updated October 26, 2003, there were only 2 known FEDORA installations. FEDORA’s own website lists around a dozen ‘registered deployment partners’ which would seem to indicate more actual deployments, but I was hard pressed to find URLs for working ones when going through that list. If anyone knows of a more complete list of working FEDORA implementations I’d be interested to hear about it. – SWL

CMU LSAL Paper on “LO-Tec” Tools (and Toys) for Creating Learning Objects

http://www.lsal.cmu.edu/lsal/expertise/
papers/notes/lotec05052003/lotec05052003.html

This paper, from Dan Rehak and others at the renowned Learning Systems Architecture Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University (which now has a new RSS feed), asks how authors actually create learning objects, and whether the current tools are supporting these actual processes or instead getting in the way. To investigate this they take the sensible step back from the technology and look at a number of low or no tech paper-based techniques for developing learning objects, with the “objective [is] to help create learning, and hide technology and standards” and thus “understand how learning technology standards can be applied in the creation of learning objects and content.”

You can draw your own conclusions – I think the process they outline is a useful one for tool builders to go through if they want to build tools that support the way people actually work. But my cursory reading didn’t reveal any huge lessons learnt from the paper-based modelling and many of the criticisms levelled at the one example tool (ReLoad) they cite could seemingly be levelled at the paper-based model as well (e.g. use of jargon for one). – SWL