Archive for the ‘Learning objects’ Category

One book that has really influenced my understanding of how open education affects the production of course materials is MIT Professor Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Published in 2005, this book doesn’t address open education or educational resources directly, but rather it discusses how companies are taking advantage of lead user innovations in a range of fields including, among other things, the manufacture of kite surfing equipment.

von Hipple’s book has a lot to say indirectly about how educational materials may or may not be suitable for reuse. One basic idea von Hippel puts forth is that the wider an audience a particular product is designed for, the less satisfied on average any one audience member is likely to be with the product. This is one challenge that designers of learning objects must grapple with.

He also describes how innovators often are less interested in the details of a particular product’s implementation than in the approach taken to create the product. The details usually differ enough that the innovator cannot directly borrow the product, but can fashion a similar product from scratch using a similar approach. This makes me wonder whether localization is less a process of adapting existing materials to local conditions and more a process of using openly published models to fashion new materials from scratch to address local needs.

Like Wealth of Networks, Democratizing Innovation is available for free as a PDF under a Creative Commons license.

Just that kind of a day, I guess. Here’s a prepreint posting of David Wiley’s review of learning object literature. David’s written and thought about learning objects more than anyone I know, and this lit review provides great perspective on the concept. No indication of what license this is made available under, but I’m sure David won’t mind my quoting the preamble.

The learning objects literature is a collection of journal articles, book chapters, white papers, and blog entries that as a whole recognize few seminal works, share few common definitions of terms, and rarely reference or build upon one another. Learning objects research generally falls into one of two categories. The traditional approach to using learning objects focuses on enabling the just-in-time automated assembly of carefully structured learning objects to create personalized educational experiences. The permissive approach to using learning objects focuses on making the reuse and localization of all resources, regardless of their structure, as effective and efficient as possible. The field is subject to a large number of criticisms. Nascent work in open educational resources points to the likely future of the field.

Here’s a great site out of University of Wisconsim-Milwaukee that provides a clear explanation of the learning object concept that I’ve discussed before as an influence on the open educational resources movement. The site provides a description of the learning object concept as follows:

• Learning objects are a new way of thinking about learning content. Traditionally, content comes in a several hour chunk. Learning objects are much smaller units of learning, typically ranging from 2 minutes to 15 minutes.
• Are self-contained – each learning object can be taken independently
• Are reusable – a single learning object may be used in multiple contexts for multiple purposes
  Can be aggregated – learning objects can be grouped into larger collections of content, including traditional course structures
• Are tagged with metadata – every learning object has descriptive information allowing it to be easily found by a search

Notice that the learning object idea is an educational technology concept and is agnostic about copyright and ownership issues, thus differentiating them from open educational resources. (Although learning objects may of course be openly licensed and thus be OERs as well).

Don’t miss the really great list of learning object repositories here as well. It’s interesting to see an OpenCourseWare site in the list, as OCW materials are not usually as granular or manipulable as true learning objects, though they can be. (via EduResources)