Today you can buy dozens and dozens of books about learning objects (LO). The subject seems to be mature enough to be used widely in learning and teaching practice. But after the initial hype less than ten years ago, things have not gone as smoothly as expected. Why? Predictions were promising: LO repositories will create a market for learning content, this will reduce costs for instructional design, shorten the development time for e-learning courses, different instructors will be able to use the same materials.

But if we look around carefully, then despite a number of excellent examples (Chapman, 2007), LOs have not gained significant place in teaching and learning practice in most educational organizations. The number of available repositories and the number of LOs in them is growing, but not so fast as expected. Reuse and sharing of LOs lack widespread character. For example, in US (Matkin, 2002), with its huge higher education market, corporations and foundations started to finance e-learning content already more than ten years ago, hoping to earn their investment back quickly. But the higher education community is not a very typical community of “consumers”, and investors claimed they miscalculated the demand. Cisco, one of the successful implementers of LOs, claims: “Very few organizations have actually developed a methodology to design, develop and implement Reusable Information Objects” (Cisco Systems Inc., 1999). In the rather developed Estonian e-learning community only 3% of teachers participating in the national e-learning conference in late 2007 claimed having used/created LOs. Many different kinds of LOs exist: interactive videos, slide shows with audio presentations, different kinds of quizzes and surveys, etc. Despite the multimedia takeover, the majority of learning materials today are still text based. They may be presented in a flash format, decorated with some illustrations, pictures, graphic elements, but their core is traditional text. In a learning environment those text materials are usually connected with questions, descriptions of practical activities and quizzes. It seems to many teachers that every text-based material created for educational purposes will serve as a LO. Can all of them really serve as LOs? Do they automatically have good LO characteristics such as reusability, etc.?

Transforming existing content material into reusable LOs is another way to create a rich collection of them. The problem with this approach is that the process of decomposing existing material may require as much attention and time from a subject expert as creating new ones. (Beck, 2007)

Download pdf Looking for a Holy Grail in e-learning: how to create reusable learning objects?