ID Meets IT Part 12: Learning Objects and Repositories

My first reaction, or association rather, when watching the presentation on learning objects was the site Learn NC, an online collection of learning resources aimed at NC Educators. While perhaps not the best example of an online repository of learning objects, Learn NC is a fairly extensive collection of not only lessons and articles related to North Carolina teaching standards, but also contains a decent collections of what could be considered "learning objects", or rather digital resources that could be used to facilitate learning. In a sense, learning objects remind me of set of Legos in that they can be selected and used to for a variety of purposes based on the designs of the creator. Ideally, an instructional designer could locate a number of these learning Legos related to a given topic and create a meaningful lesson from them in much the same way my fourth graders could magically assemble an rebel X-wing from a seemingly disparate set of plastic blocks. However, as any moderately tech savvy teacher can tell you, and as mentioned by Wiley as a potential paradox with learning objects, is that finding a learning objects that fits your instructional context can be a challenge. On the one hand, if they are general enough to be reusable, their actual use may be quite limited; and if they are specific enough to be useful, they may not be applicable to your instructional context or, more likely, very difficult to locate.  However, if you are able to locate a suitable learning objects, this can save a great deal of time in having to create one yourself.

As an instructor I've used learning objects both online and off. My offline collection of "learning objects" consisted of rack full of plastic bins that contained a variety of content area manipulatives. There were math learning wrap-ups, flash cards, pattern blocks, Cuisenaire  rods,  fraction bars, dice, counters, chips, circuit boards, geoboards, game boards and quite a bit more.  On their own, their instructional value was limited (though the entertainment value for the imaginative was without bound), but combined with a well designed plan, their instructional potential was unlimited. I think that digital learning objects share these characteristics with their offline companions. Stand alone learning objects need a well designed plan to really make use of the instructional potential. I wish I could relay in the next couple of sentences exactly how this is done, but my own experiences utilizing digital learning objects is seems fairly basic compared to what's possible. On our classroom website, I incorporate a number of images, games, clips, etc. into online instructional units, and had a "toolbox" and discussion rooms that contained a set of links to learning objects centered on a given topic, but these objects were used minimally compared to our offline learning objects. This partly due to limited access, and greater experience and ready-made lessons with offline objects.

Fortunately, there are growing number of online resources that make it easier to incorporate digit learning objects into meaningful lessons. For those of you with SMART Boards, the SMART Exchange has become the go to source for everything SMART board. What used to be a chore is... well, honestly is still kind of a chore, but it has made finding resources to use in SMART Board enhanced lessons a little less painful.  Or, if you happen to be Canadian, the Virtual Muesum of Canade --and large scale museum sites in general are great repositories of LOs-- is an amazing collection of potential learning objects related to all things Canada, including, but not limited to, the great Tim Horton of hockey and donut fame. Hopefully, as search engines like Google and Bing begin to leverage our social graph, locating useful learning objects will allow us to rely less on known but lmited repositories like the SMART Exchange and museum websites, use broad search engines like Google to locate very specific and relevant resources to use in our teaching.