Got learning objects?
If you teach, especially online, the idea of using "learning objects" is compelling. You take some educational content and package it up so that it can be viewed or run at your student's convenience. It doesn't take long to imagine all sorts of wonderful uses for this sort of thing.
And learning objects are typically easy to find. For almost any discipline or topic you can find learning objects on the Internet. In fact, so many learning objects are available that they now are organized into repositories that you can search by topic, or resource type, or technology type.
The difficulty lies not in finding learning objects (and other resources), but rather in putting the ones you do find into actual use.
Learning objects are most easily used when they are designed for a specific purpose. Suppose that you are teaching in the social sciences, and some of your students are having trouble with the statistical concepts that they need for your course. You might address this problem by creating a series of learning objects (tutorials) that students could view to get information about the specific statistics concepts used in your course. Teachers have been doing this sort of thing for a long time, we used to call them hand-outs.
But the Internet changes our assumptions about how this sort of background material can be provided to students. You might imagine creating a learning resource that could be viewed via the Internet. that resource could be anything from a web page, to a video clip, to an interactive lesson of some kind. With this resource available on the Internet lots of students could potentially benefit from the work. They wouldn't even necessarily have to be studying in the social sciences, basic statistics are used in many different disciplines.
But this is where it starts to get tricky. If you want to create (or use) a reusable learning object you'll need to consider the level at which the material is presented, and the contextual material that is needed to use the resource.
If you want to learn more about this the Utah State University open access course, Advanced Topics in Learning Object Design and Reuse is a great place to start (in this case, the course itself represents a reusable learning object). Using the materials from this course you can quickly put a foundation under your use of learning objects. The course web site includes free access to the textbook which is short and to the point.
But maybe you don't have time to read the entire book and you just want to find learning objects and figure out how you can use them.
Below we've provided links to several prominent learning object repositories (lists of learning objects), and there are three important points to keep in mind when evaluating the potential use of a learning object:
- What will the student learn?
- What will happen if the student has a technical problem?
- Is the context assumed by the learning object appropriate for my use?
For a learning object to be useful to your students it must be at an appropriate level. And it must be put into a meaningful context.
The learning objects list of lists. (from the University of Wisconsin: opens in a new window)
Merlot: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (opens in a new window)
Top Picks: OK, a few sources of learning objects stand out. Here are our favorites.
|
