ICT in Education

Thoughts on: Technology and human issues in reusing learning objects (Collis & Strijker, 2004)

October 9, 2007

Collis, B., & Strijker, A. (2004). Technology and Human Issues in Reusing Learning Objects. Journal of Interactive Media in Education. May (4). Retrieved 10 July 2006 from http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2004/4/

This paper asks the question – will the rise of internet technology lead to greater re-use of learning resources

It then makes it’s position very clear – no.

A big problem I’m seeing with this paper is that it doesn’t clearly define learning objects

The two arguments for this are “…that human aspects not technology will constrain what will be done with learning objects. Our other argument is that the learning philosophy that seems to underlie many of the discussions and the technology relating to learning objects will limit their depth of development and impact”

Personally, these arguments seem a little thin but let’s dig in and take a proper look.

Collis and Strijker look at three different contexts that learning objects are used in and how the approaches in these three are fundamentally different.

“The most substantial problems however were related to incompatibilities with the local context and culture of the end users… The reusability of an electronic learning resource depends on its fit with the language, culture, curriculum, computer-use practices and pedagogical approaches of the potential learners and their instructors. Making this fit has proven to be very difficult”

The three contexts they look at are universities, corporate training and military training.

University context:

• “instructors also design, develop and deliver courses, frequently bringing their research into the course materials”
• instructor chooses how to structure the course
• courses regularly updated to accommodate updated research
• content may be more instructor specific
• limited use of tutorial software
• focus on developing higher level skills

Corporate context:

• stronger emphasis on just-in-time learning
• content may be industry generic (often outsourced) or business specific (developed in-house)
• content regularly updated to match business changes
• sharing and reusing objects/resources commonplace
• learning tends to divide into formal, structured (often LMS based) and informal (peer, c.o.p based)
• elearning seen (by the authors) as almost entirely online, little face to face (grudging acknowledgement of blended approaches)

Military context:

• heavy emphasis on consistency of information
• materials highly specialised and localised
• materials developed in-house
• strong task focus to learning

Comparing these three contexts:

• university content the most divergent, focussed on the instructor who also develops it – reuse relates to reuse of their material in different courses
• corporate must address the business needs and content is more fixed
• universities are good at providing academics with templates, corporates assemble learner centred resource databases
• military approach is fairly static and centralised, instructors generally not developers
• all three approaches tend to separate classroom/lecture based learning from computer based training
• uni’s use a LCMS, corporates use an LMS, military may also use an LMS but in a more secure way
• uni – instructor considers the learning object their IP and may not share willingly, corporate learning objects are company property, reuse is more common, military learning objects more secret but reuse is important

Learning philosophies

The authors divide the two standard philosophies into knowledge-acquistion (behaviourism/directed learning) and participation (constructivism, social constructivism)

Participation approach 

• more about learners contributing reusable learning objects
• learning objects function as discussion sparks

Acquisition approach

• this (according to the authors) is the approach taken by LMS’ (which I think is rubbish, it’s just a tool)
• the “least complex of three levels of learning, followed by highly individual constructivist approaches where the goal is self-regulated learning and the highest and most-desirable level: collaborative learning, participation in a community and knowledge creation and sharing. (Maybe – and only maybe – in a university context but what about schools and VET – these researchers seem to forget that there is education before you turn 18)
• “the snapshots and freezeframes of knowledge objects… are not to be mistaken for the processes of learning” (Lambe, 2002. pp. 5-6)

These authors clearly dislike learning objects – why are we being exposed to this level of negativity – if you don’t want to use it, fine, don’t but it doesn’t mean that don’t have usefulness.

Learning object lifecycle 

“A learning object can be seen as going through six distinct stages in it’s lifecycle: Obtaining or creating, labelling, offering, selecting, using and retaining”

What about designing?

Obtaining: 

“material is obtained in a digital form for easy distribution and adaptability”
How they are developed depends on the developer but Why comes down to the learning context.

University – to supplement the textbook by supporting classroom activities
Corporate – to make learning appealing and to cut costs by replacing instructors.  the object is ideally editable, compatible with inhouse technology and brand-able.
Military – for internal consistency and localisation

Where do they come from:

Universities – instructors resources, colleagues, projects, conferences, the web
Corporate – industry bodies, external vendors
Military – inhouse

Labelling:

Essentially tagging and metadata – database-oriented developers tools (such as Learning object repositories)

Why:

Universities: locating resources, organisation
Corporate: linking it to competencies, quality control
Military: archiving and reproduction, efficiency in recreating the resources (e.g shutterspeed of photos)

All of these Whys could easily be transferrable across the three contexts.

Offering: 

Where they come from  – see above

Selecting: 

There may be associated tools that support selection of these materials – (which presumably use the aforementioned tagging) – as well as Competency Assessment Tools, which can test learners and recommend pertinent learning objects.

Instructors consider the relevance of the material to their context (well duh)

Using: 

Pure (unchanged) or adapted – customised for the new environment.

Modification time, effort and expense means that the Pure versions can be better if they are appropriate (again, well duh)

Adaptation requires full access to all of the resources, without limitations. – “therefore the packaging of learning objects… is an essential method for distributing objects between systems. Distribution of packages includes the copying of learning objects instead of linking. By editing the learning object, a new instance or version of the learning material is created. Linking material is seen as an appropriate way to reuse material more than once.”

“The way a learning object is used reflects the underlying assumptions about how learning can be instantiated within a given context”

Retaining: 

“After or during the actual use of a certain learning object that object can becom outdated and should therefore be deleted or revised” – like a textbook I guess. “New instances or versions may be created to revise the original object”

ISSUES: 

specifications / standards: quickly evolving and rather technical – need for some technical skill in developers

granularity: objects might need adaption at ” course, module, lesson or object level”

reuse: interoperability between systems, exchange of material and the relevant financial/licensing/copyright issues

meta-tagging: objective vs subjective metadata – objective comes from external sources, subjective may come from someone who doesn’t know what they are doing

access and privileges: confidentiality, copyright, classified material, network security, terrorism

usability: need to be easy to use

time and effort: metadata tagging doesn’t provide obvious initial benefits and isn’t as highly valued as it should be

pedagogical aspects: “the opinions of those involved about the potential pedagogical value of learning objects can vary enormously, particularly in different organisational contexts” – oh for goodness sake, this says absolutely nothing at all – why am I reading this rubbish?

organisational payoff:  “What’s in it for the organisation?” – ok, I’m out of here, this is getting ridiculous – what’s in any form of training for the organisation?

intrinsic motivation: “why should creators want to share their material? Spontaneous sharing on the world wide web rarely occurs in the corporate or military sectors…”

willingness: “is it a protected domain of knowledge”

support services : “What are the resources available for the human support of the different phases of the lifestyle” – well finally, an observation that doesn’t suck or state the blindingly obvious.

access and privileges: “Who can or cannot have access to learning objects?” – didn’t you already use this heading?

ownership and copyright: “who owns the material, the creator, the development group, the subject matter expert, the publisher, the internet provider, the host organisation or the organisation itself?” – same questions could be asked about textbooks.
Semantic web and ontologies: An answer? To what question?

The authors make the point that some people claim that learning objects will change learning forever because they are accessible and taggable but they believe that all 6 aspects of the lifecycle are equally important and the other 4 make things complicated.

They concede that the ability to share and search for resources using technology can be valuable and feel that intelligent use of resources will help resolve many of the implementation issues. They feel that they are best suited to knowledge transfer (acquisitional approach) but can’t help at higher levels (of course, you could always try developing something – oh, I don’t know, like a game – to address this)

They seem to feel that learning objects can’t/won’t be used in blended learning environments

I think our class did something bad and making us read that article was our punishment.

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