Resources

Ken Allan, The Correspondence School, Wellington, NZ

The full version of this paper is available to download in pdf format - see box below. On this page you'll find the paper's introduction.

Introduction

Have you ever learned how to activate a setting on a mobile phone by studying one of its animated tutorials? Did you at one time make use of online instruction to learn to touch-type or increase your typing speed? Perhaps you were once privileged to operate the controls of a flight simulator as part of the training to become an aircraft pilot. If your answer to any of those is yes then you have benefited from using a learning object.

The learning objects referred to here, and others like them, owe much of their success to one common aspect of their design: feedback that is relevant to the immediate circumstance of the learner - the hallmark of a good learning object. This discussion paper is about the learning object, its design, development and appropriate use as one of the many components in the portfolio of applied e-learning tools and strategies available to the 21st century teacher.

Early last century simple mechanical devices were invented to help with learning. The 1960s saw computers assist with traditional learning methods such as face-to-face language instruction. A sophisticated blend of technology and pedagogy was developed for this - computer assisted language learning or CALL - that is still in use today. In the late 1970s it was recognised that digital learning devices could be precision designed to afford specific and objective learning in many areas within a huge range of educational topics. Provided the fabric of their construction was carefully designed, such devices could be accessed almost anywhere at any time and on a variety of electronic media.

A device fitting some or all of these descriptors is broadly termed a digital learning object. It came into its own with the advent of the internet in 1992. Use of the fundamental principles behind learning objects has been raised to a level of maturity through the work of organisations such as MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), a free and open resource involving a large online community in the development of learning objects for higher education hosted by the California State University System.