About learning objects

A learning object is ‘any digital resource that can be reused to support learning’.

(Wiley, D.A. 2000, Connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: A definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy. Retrieved January 19, 2004, from http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CIE/AOP/LO_what.html)

Learning objects are:

• smaller units of learning
• reusable
• able to be aggregated or sequenced
• tagged with metadata so that they can be easily found by a search

(Adapted from: Wisconsin Online Resource Center. (n.d.). What are learning objects? Retrieved January 19, 2004, from http://www.wisc-online.com/Info/FIPSE%20-%20What%20is%20a%20Learning%20Object.htm)

Learning objects can be used in face-to-face classrooms and in online learning situations.
 

What advantages do learning objects bring?

Learning objects have a number of advantages including:

• economic – useful resources can be shared and reused by students and educators all over the globe

• flexibility – the same learning object can be used in many different ways, in different learning contexts, within different curriculum frameworks and even for completely different learning purposes

• customisation – the context around the learning object, and often the learning object itself, can be customised by each user to suit their needs (eg literacy levels, focus of inquiry, level of expertise in the content, take into account prior learning etc)

• give the users experiences that they could not access because of the nature of the experience - eg real life problem solving situations that students cannot easily access, science experiments that may be too dangerous or expensive, experiments that might need to be carried out over a long time frame, variables/conditions in experiments that can be set and controlled easily, resources that cannot be accessed easily can be brought together, etc.

• high quality resources – using multimedia allows for simulations, animations or use of video and sound to improve the quality of the learning experience offered to students

• access – students and teachers can access resources from many different places, at different times and for their own purposes eg for problem-solving, consolidation of a skill etc

This means that learning objects can be anything from a PDF or Word documents to complex multimedia simulations and learning sequences that use, for example, video and audio. They can include:

• tools - something which allows students to create something new eg an application that allows a student to prepare a graph

• instructional objects - a 'tutorial' that provides guidance on how to do something eg an application that demonstrates how to graph and how a graph might be used

• exploration objects - something that allows students to explore an idea or concept eg an object that allowed students to explore how data looks when presented in different ways

• problem-solving objects - something that might combine elements of each of the other types of objects described above with a context for using them eg an environmental simulation in which students are confronted with a problem, take some environmental measurements, collect and graph a range of data and use that data to solve the initial problem.
   

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