On the Concept of ‘Learning Object Design by Contract’

The concept of ‘learning object’ represents an attempt to enhance the design of Web-based educational contents, focusing on their reusability in diverse learning contexts. The key to reusability is the provision of metadata in standardized formats for fine-grained content items. But reusability requires precise metadata records, especially if machine-understandability is required to build software modules that automatically retrieve and combine learning objects to form higher-level units of instruction. In this paper, the concept of “design by contract” – borrowed from Object Oriented Software Engineering – is assimilated to the context of learning object design, with the aim of coming up with more rigorous approaches to metadata annotation, enhancing machine understandability. A concrete approach of such novel form of annotation is sketched, along with a consideration of stateful learning objects as a new composition paradigm to personalized hypermedia systems. Key-Words: Learning technology, Learning Objects, Design By Contract.