UC Week 9
8th of April 2010
This session consisted of:
- defining learning objects, and investigating their utility
- exploring and using learning object repositories
- exporting a learning object from a repositiry and deploying it within the Moodle Playpen for this unit
- exploring applications and tools used in creating learning objects
Learning Objects
Learning objects have been defined on the Learning about Learning Objects website as
“digital, re-usable pieces of content that can be used to accomplish a learning objective”
or as David Wiley states
“any digital resource that can be reused to support learning”.
So, the basic idea is that an object, an activity, or any “thing” that forms part of teaching and learning can be a learning object. In the context of digital use, it is stand alone, able to be reused and adapted for specific needs, able to be aggregated in a modular way to build into a larger object, and, importantly, tagged with metadata so that it can be stored, searched and retrieved easily. The idea of learning object repositories is discussed below. Learning objetcs can be imported into platforms such as Moodle to organise and operate them.
The primary intention of learning objects is that they should be able to be used in any environment, requiring them to have standard characteristics so that this works nicely. There are many aspects of learning objects that are subject to this “standardisation” , an example being the way that metadata is associated with learning objects.
“Metadata is information about an object, be it physical or digital. As the number of objects grows exponentially and our needs for learning expand equally dramatically, the lack of information or metadata about objects places a critical and fundamental constraint on our ability to discover, manage, and use objects. This Standard addresses this problem by defining a structure for interoperable descriptions of learning objects.” http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/files/LOM_1484_12_1_v1_Final_Draft.pdf (from 2002, so quite old now)
In a seemingly remarkable occurence, in 1997 the US Department of Defence decide to develop a way to “to harness the power of learning and information technologies to standardize and modernize education and training…”
The specific goals were to:
- Identify and recommend standards for training software and associated services purchased by Federal agencies and contractors.
- Facilitate and accelerate the development of key technical training standards in industry and in standards-development organizations.
- Establish guidelines on the use of standards and provide a mechanism to assist DoD and other Federal agencies in the large-scale development, implementation, and assessment of interoperable and reusable learning systems.
From this initiative came SCORM – Sharable Content Object Reference Model, which:
“integrates a set of related technical standards, specifications, and guidelines designed to meet SCORM’s high-level requirements—accessible, interoperable, durable, and reusable content and systems. SCORM content can be delivered to your learners via any SCORM-compliant Learning Management System (LMS) using the same version of SCORM.”
SCORM allows the ideal of complete compatibility across all digital systems.Moodle complies with most of the SCORM standards to allow compatibility with content from other systems.
The IMS Global Learning Consortium “is a non-profit collaboration among the world’s leading educational technology suppliers, content providers, educational institutions, school districts, and government organizations dedicated to improving education and learning through the strategic application of technology.”
The IMSGLC seem to be the “go to” group for all things to do with learning object standardisation currently, especially according to their home page… “If you are looking for the future of education and purposeful innovation to improve access, affordability, and quality of education – you have come to the right place.”
They are currently developing Common Cartridges which are intended to “define a commonly supported content format, able to run on any compliant LMS platform.” Look here for (a lot) more information on Common Cartridge, including exactly what the difference between SCORM and Common Cartridge is. My take on it is that SCORM was developed for use in stand alone, self contained learning objects designed for self-paced learning, where Common Cartridges primarily act as an organiser of content from other sources, and contains assessment opportunities not available in SCORM. Well, something like that… 
Moodle 2.0 will use Common Cartridges which seems like a good thing. It is experimental in version 1.9.7.
Several of my students have asked the easiest way to have access to material on my Moodle sites when they finish the unit – Common Cartridge sounds like the answer.
Learning Object Repositories
There are a huge number of learning object repositories, and so there are repository repositories like NMC Learning Object Repositories, Resourcing the Curriculum, and Smart Teaching.org to organise them. So, I guess that makes that last sentence a repository repository repository.
Have a look back at the screen shot from Week 4. You can see that in the Moodle Playpen there are a number of links to things like “MIT Anthropology” and “incomprehensible linguistics stuff”. These are IMS content packages that we imported into Moodle from the MIT Open CourseWare learning object repository. “MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.” So, anyone in the world (with web access) can use MIT course content for essentially any purpose. There is the caveat given that :
- OCW is not an MIT education.
- OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
- OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
- Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.
but it does seem like a very generous and useful service, especially as they claim that “Each course we publish requires an investment of $10,000 to $15,000 to compile course materials from faculty, ensure proper licensing for open sharing, and format materials for global distribution.”
So, lets have a look at one. This is a screenshot of the course The Lexicon and Its Features (as taught in: Spring 2007), as imported and viewed (deployed?) through our Moodle Playpen.
linguistics
It seems to work quite nicely (the content, as I have noted, is incomprehensible to me but if I wanted to study it, this would be a good start). It is controlled by the summary pane on the left, and the content is displayed in the main pane on the right. Quite a few of the files are .pdf so are viewed outside Moodle. There are a few gaps (no title for most of the lecture notes) and advertising does appear, but otherwise a smooth running Learning Object. As discussed in the SCORM versus Common Cartridge discussion above, this content does seem a bit isolated from anything in the real worls -there is no scope for any interaction with it other than reading it, there is no assessment, and it is a bit cruel to read about all the exciting things “real” students of this course did. I think the ideas proposed by the Common Cartridge group are aimed at addressing this, and I hope they are succesful as it has huge potential for students and teachers.
The MIT Open CourseWare learning objects are all IMS compliant. This compliance is based around the imsmanifest.xml file which describes the content in the learning object.
The Learning Object Repository Network (LORN) is an Australian site that “is for teachers and trainers, it is your gateway to online training resources – discover, download and use learning resources in your teaching and learning!” and “provides access to learning resources from a variety of learning material collections. The collections contain a variety of learning material types, from interactive digital learning material which can be incorporated into your learning management system to learner guides which can be printed.” It is for the VEt sector, and so does not contain any material really useful to my teaching. The Discipline of Pharmacy is investigating opportunities for training pharmacy assistants (a VET activity), however there are no resources specifically for this in LORN 9although there are some nice looking general retail modules). Maybe in the future…or we could produce them???
Here is a link to the standards which LORN sets for its packages.
Not all repositories list IMS compliant objects solely. Some of these are:
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) “is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.” They offer a category of pharmacy resources, which sounds promising; however a large number of the resources are just links to other websites – useful in part but not really what I would call a Learning Object. (e.g. the Clinical Pharmacology object is just a link to the related online Merck Manual chapter. Other things look interesting, but I will have to explore those at another time).
The Education Network Australia (EDNA) has a catalogue of resources – but the pharmacy related ones just appear to be links to pharmacy school home pages and various slightly dubious looking “online pharmacist” sites.
The Pharmacy Experiential Learning Database (PELD) (which requires registration so you won’t be able to see much unless you are a member) is a repository of activities for pharmacy students during placements and externships, to provides access to materials developed for the national Experiential Placements in Pharmacy project funded through the Australian Learning and Teaching Council . They are peer reviewed, but they are not packaged as digital learning objects and so are really quite cumbersome to use. I have used one of them previously, and it required me using cut-and-paste from the screen to a text document to “create” a usable activity – not really up to speed when compared with the objects avaialable elsewhere. I suspect the fact that the project began in 2007 contributes to the lack of any digital aspect, as the SCORM/IMS/Common Cartridge movement seems to be newer than that (in the mainstream anyway).
Creative Commons
All of this activity raises the spectre of copyright – who owns what and what can you do with it? So, Creative Commons have created various copyright licenses which address the unique issues in creating, sharing and using digital material. You can read all about them on their website, but it seems to be working quite well so far.
Hot Potatoes
Hot Potatoes was discussed as just one example of an application that can be use to create learning objects.
“The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source.”
So there you go!
Moodle
Moodle, of course, can be used to create learning objects – in fact Moodle sites are learning objects themselves. You can “backup” (poor semantics for this function) the site, or elements of it, as a zipped IMS package and do what you will with them. The most useful aspect for my teaching is the ability to reuse things in different units, and perhaps to provide the whole unit as a learning object to students when they have finished the unit and no longer access the Moodle site (which Coomon Cartridge promises to do even better). I will offer this to the current classes I teach when they finish next week.
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