Review: Learning Objects in Distance Education: Addressing issues of Quality, Learner Control and Accessibility.

Title: Learning Objects in Distance Education: Addressing issues of Quality, Learner Control and Accessibility. 

Authors: Gretchen Lowerison, Genevieve Gallant and Prof. Gary Boyd.

Publication date: 2003

Key Learning Points:

1. Definition of Learning Objects

2. Benefits of Learning Objects.

3. Dilemma with Learning Objects

4. Course Structure and Instructional Design.

5. Quality Issues.

6. Content Accessibility Issues.

7. The Checklist for evaluating a given LO.

Summary:

Learning objects are the learning resources that are available online and facilitate learning by making learner more engaged in learning process, however there are some concern about the quality of those learning objects. Lowerison, Gallant & Boyd (2003) described the learning objects concept and the concept of reusable learning objects. They defined LO as any object that support learning in computer-based media context. Learning Objects give learners greater control on his/her learning in flexible and managed environment. Lowerison, Gallant & Boyd (2003) provided a table that is described by South and Monson (2000), this table shows the aspects: durability, interoperability, reusability, discoverability, extensibility, affordability and manageability, each one of them defines a positive deployment of LO.

Some main benefits that were addressed in the article are:

1. Flexibility, learning objects can be used and reused in many contexts.

2. Content management that ease materials retrieval.

3. Customizability of content to learners needs.

4. Open-source that eliminates the problems of incompatible systems,softare and platforms.

There are some problems or concerns that is facing the instructional designers; one is the variation in defining the learning objects another one is granularity which is the classifications of the learning objects. For both concerns Lowerison, Gallant & Boyd (2003) had provided arguments from the literature.

According to Sepherd (2000), LO can be:

1. Integrated to give the learner additional information on a topic

2. Informational: takes the form of overviews and summaries.

3. Practice takes the form of problems, tests, games or case studies.

There are some quality standards that LO should meet before it can be used. Organizations set out some quality standards for that purpose; the article gave some examples, one of them is MERLOT (The Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching), for evaluating LO, MERLOT rely on peer review in form of written comments and a star rating system on a scale of 1-5 to: quality of content, potential effectiveness as a teaching tool, and ease of use.

The checklist is a guideline that the instructional designers follow when evaluating effectiveness of a learning object, it helps users also to evaluate key elements of the learning object.

The checklist has the following sections:

- Object Identification

- Media type/Function

- Interactivity Type and Level

- Validity of Content

- Manageability & Retrieval

- Interoperability and Technical Soundness

- Granularity

- Flexibility

- Content Accessibility

Relevant Statements:

The concepts that are discussed in this article are very relevant to what we study in our course of DL, the concepts are:

- Learning objects definition as we studied that in week 3, Learning Objects are information units (learning objective, instruction that teaches the objective, assessment that measure the objective) that are indexed and available throughCOMPUTER, these units can be assembled together to achieve learning objective.

- Reusable Learning Object (RLO) definition also in week 3, RLO is a unit of learning content that is ready to be reused in multiple instructional contexts. The RLO are: digital, reusable, self-contained, small in size, standardized, searchable (tagged with metadata), flexible, aggregate, suited for new types of learners and cost-effective.

- For learning objects to be reusable it is important that they are structured and follow a systematic instructional process.

- Benefits of Learning Objects:

- Enable students easy and fast access to information.

- Help students to focus on concept key to their understanding.

- Support learners in developing deeper understanding of the object's content. 

- Instructional designers must consider elements such as prior learning, learning style preferences, learning outcomes, learning goals, general computer information, and available time.

- Evaluating effectiveness of learning objects.

Critical Analysis:

Argument : Learning Object definition.

Lowerison, Gallant & Boyd (2003) defined LO as “ a learning object can be any object that facilitate some valued learning in some computer-based media context.” (p.1). I think this definition is broad, actually learning object definition is still a concern despite of that the literature is rich of many definitions and discussions about LO(Churchill, 2006), I read Lee & Sue (2006) article and I liked more how they added three types of learning items to the LO model, It describes how LO model actually work, they added content items, practice items and assessment items, “A learning object is a granule of instruction design to meet a specific instructional objective(s).” (Lee & Su, 2006, p.4).

Practical Implication:

At my school, I design my own learning objects for my teaching subject, I try to make them small and valuable, I use PowerPoint to design them, from this article I understand the types of learning objects and I knew where my LO fits, also I will apply the methods used to evaluate learning objects when searching for suitable resources. I believe also that these methods or criteria are good to be considered while designing learning objects.

Learning Reflections:

Learned lessons:

- The quality issues and what are the quality standards.

- The checklist for evaluating learning objects and its categories.

Also the points that i mentioned above in the Relevant Statements section.

Works cited:

Churchill, D. (2006). Towards a useful classification of learning objects. Education Tech Research Dev,55(5), 479-497. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11423-006-9000-y

Lee, G., & Su, S. (2006). Learning Object Models and an E-Learning Service Infrastructure.International Journal Of Distance Education Technologies, 4(1), 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/jdet.2006010101

Lowerison, G., Gallant, G., & Boyd, G. (2003). Learning Objects in Distance Education: Addressing issues of Quality, Learner Control and Accessibility.