In this July/August EDUCAUSE article Susan Metros surveys the current state of activity and inactivity regarding LOs. She concludes that the early excitement about LOs may have stalled and that significant problems persist, but promising efforts are still underway. ___JH
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"Numerous reasons can be given for why learning objects have not fulfilled their promise of transforming education. The definition was too ambiguous and broad. Faculty were not accustomed to sharing and reusing course materials. Developing high-quality learning objects required much time and costly professional expertise. The lack of indexing standards made it difficult to retrieve objects. Institutions have not invested in managing knowledge. And lastly, there was little documented proof that learning objects supported learning any better than the traditional, linearly organized course."
"Although institutions of higher education are far from disassembling their long-established discipline silos, they are showing a renewed interest in multi-, inter-, and cross-disciplinary studies. Unlike textbooks, learning objects—with their ability to be navigated nonlinearly, to incorporate multimedia, and to be interactive and customizable—exist in a virtual world that can be accessed within and across disciplines, both vertically and horizontally. Some in the academic research arena are beginning to look back and to document best practices while initiating formal research studies. However, the question of whether educators are willing to change their age-old teaching practice and to develop, use, and share knowledge, in the form of 'learning objects,' still begs to be answered."
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