The point of objects

The idea is, that by building learning resources as reusable components, developers of learning materials, learning managers and learners themselves will all stand to gain.

Let’s start with developers. According to J. D. Fletcher (1999), reusable learning objects, assuming that they are built in conformance with emerging technical standards, will provide e-learning developers with a range of valuable ‘ilities’: portability across platforms, durability across evolving versions of operating systems, sharability across authoring systems and wide accessibility via the Web. The benefits of these efficiencies will be substantial, according to the ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) initiative of the US Department of Defense – they’re predicting that development costs will drop by 50-80%.

Learning administrators, whether they’re in the training department or a college of further education, stand to benefit too. For a start, it’s easier to customise learning materials to particular audiences. Just replace those objects that are audience-specific – perhaps the worked examples or the case studies – with new versions that meet the precise needs of a particular organisation, country, department or industry.

Administrators will also enjoy the ease with which they can mix and match components from a wide variety of sources – colleges, publishers and individual authors from around the world – with materials that are home grown. The aggregating of such diverse content is made possible by the tagging of learning objects with metadata (data about the data), which precisely describe the contents, the form they take, their origin and applicability. Worldwide standards for learning metadata are now largely in place, as an element of SCORM (Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model), the ADL standards framework.

And let’s not forget learners themselves. An object-orientated approach helps them too. Most importantly, well-designed learning objects come in small chunks, designed not to overload the learner. We now know just how restricted short-term memory is (seven to nine pieces in fact) and that it’s pointless pushing on with a learning session until what’s there already has been properly rehearsed and absorbed.

Benefits of learning objects

For learners	For administrators	For developers
Personalisation - courses can be constructed to meet individual requirements	Courses can be customised to suit the needs of different audiences	Objects can be built or modified using many different authoring tools
Learning comes in digestible chunks	Courses can be constructed using components from a wide range of sources	The same objects can be employed across a variety of hardware and software platforms
Learning is available on a just-in-time basis	Components can be reused to meet a range of learning needs

Learners can also benefit from increased personalisation. In the future there won’t be such a thing as a shrink-wrapped, fully-integrated e-learning course. Instead, courses will be constructed to meet specific individual needs on a just-in-time basis, by drawing on the massive library of learning objects that will be available on an organisation’s network or on the Web. Who’ll construct the courses? Well this will often be accomplished automatically by learning management systems, based on available information about a learner’s existing competencies or preferences, but the course-building process could just as easily be carried out by administrators or learners themselves.

There’s another benefit for learners and that’s because of the changing face of workplace learning. Increasingly, individuals are not prepared to wait for the next available course to obtain the information they need, and they don’t want to have to travel somewhere else to get it. They want their learning now and at a place that’s convenient to them, at their desk or on their laptop. And learning objects are small enough to use here and now, to dodge the interruptions and solve the problem.