Learning objects in use

摘要

One of the really hot topics in the learning community at the moment is learning objects. Right now a lot of effort is put into developing and describing standards for learning objects - standards like SCORM, Ariadne or Dublin Core. These initiatives will definitely benefit the persons seeking information, but will be an extra burden on the persons supplying the information - the lecturers - since they have to add all the metadata. In e-learning courses a lot of materials get developed - materials like discussions, essays, taped video sessions etc. - and all these materials are potential learning objects - something that others can reuse. It is therefore important, that it is easy for the lecturer to add metadata to the learning objects, so the objects can be easily found either by other lecturers or by the students attending the course. In this article we will focus on balancing the need for metadata with the limited time the lecturers have. This is done in several steps: First we define what we think is a minimum amount of metadata and discuss this metadata description to see if it fits requirements of the lecturer, the students and the requirements for describing all the different types of materials. Secondly we propose and develop an open-source tool that can be used to store and retrieve the materials using metadata descriptions and be integrated in a lot of different e-learning systems. Thirdly we will describe how this approach can be expanded to give access to electronic materials like article databases. Finally we give some conclusions and remarks on how to make the creation of learning objects happen.