Friday, November 22, 2002

Introductory Resources on Learning Objects, C2T2 This valuable introduction was created by Scott Leslie of the Centre for Curriculum Transfer and Technology in British Columbia. It includes sections defining and explaining Learning Objects, Metadata, Learning Object Repositories, and Technologies and Standards. Many links are provided to relevant technical resources, including a few to specific learning repositories such as MERLOT. The key questions for instructors, "Why should I use learning objects in my teaching?" and "How can I use learning objects?" are addressed. Similar questions and more elaborate guidelines will need to be provided at any faculty support center that intends to assist instructors in the use learning object repositories. This collection of resources is perhaps more technically oriented, more suited to professionals concerned about learning objects, than to instructors who will use learning objects. 11:00:19 AM    COMMENT []

Sabbaticizing I've been on sabbatical leave for more than a month and a half now, since Oct. 1, 2002. I began the sabbatical by attending the MERLOT conference in Atlanta, then took a trip to Victoria to visit the Centre for Curriculum Transfer and Technology (C2T2), and just returned from attending the WCET conference in Denver. The greatest luxury of being on sabbatical is time; time to travel, time to read, time to explore--time to get lost intellectually and not care how long it takes to return. When I began this project I was focused on collecting repositories of online instructional resources and putting the collection together in a form that could readily be used by instructors at Eastern and other institutions, perhaps via a web site or portal. Now, after just a few weeks, I've found that there are innumerable online instructional repositories (depending upon how "instructional" and "repository" are defined)--far too many to simply provide a listing and expect that instructors will be able to effectively use the list. I've also found that there are many overlapping categories, concepts, interests and approaches: digital libraries, learning objects, metadata standards, open source software, instructional repositories, XML, etc. What seems most needed, at least for my purposes in assisting instructors to use online repositories, is a set of guidelines about locating, evaluating, acquiring, and fitting online resources into course planning and revisions/expansions of courses. At this point there are many more repositories available and under construction than there are guidelines for using collections of learning resources. Instructors don't have the time to search hundreds of repositories containing thousands of learning objects. The promise of interlinked repositories or master repositories is just that, a research promise that may not be fulfilled for many years. So, the question is, How can online instructional resources best be used now? I do not yet have a good answer to this question. 10:51:54 AM    COMMENT []