From Content Objects to Learning Objects: Adding Instructional Information to Educational Meta-Data

This paper presents the work of the KOD European project for maintaining instructional information in learning objects meta-data, so that they can be easily reused for the manual and automatic construction of courses. 1. Learning Objects and Learning Objects Meta-Data Learning objects currently lead other candidates for the position of choice in the next generation of instructional design, development and delivery, due to their potential for reusability, generativity, adaptivility, and scalability. They can be thought of as a new type of computer-based instruction, grounded in the objectoriented paradigm of computer science 0. A working definition by LTSC (the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee, ltsc.ieee.org) defines learning objects as any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning 0. Examples of learning objects are digital exercises, study texts, cases, media assets, courses, study programmes, etc. The basic idea is that a learning object can stand on its own and may be reused. In practice, this means that learning objects are mostly smaller objects – smaller than courses – which can be re-used in different courses 0. For the purposes of this paper, we adopt Wiley definition, which narrows learning objects to any digital resources that can be reused to support learning 0. Reusability of learning objects requires that they are described in a common format, so that they can be easily searched, retrieved and reused for the (manual or automatic) construction of courses (i.e. collections of learning objects, as opposed to atomic learning units). In this context, a number of international efforts have been initiated during the past few years, for defining common educational meta-data standards. That is, meta-data sets which go beyond existing meta-data specifications (such as the Dublin Core meta-data set, dublincore.org), aiming to support the common description of content objects (i.e. as opposed to learning objects) 0, 0. The current IEEE LTSC Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) specification for the description of learning objects includes the following fields 0: 1. general: general information that describes the learning object as a whole; 2. lifecycle: features related to the history and current state of this learning object and those who have affected this learning object during its evolution; 3. meta-metadata: information about the metadata instance itself (rather than the learning object that the metadata instance describes); 4. technical: technical requirements and technical characteristics of the learning object; 5. educational: educational and pedagogic characteristics of the learning object; 6. rights: intellectual property rights and conditions of use for the learning object; 7. relation: features that define the relationship between the learning object and other related learning objects; 8. annotation: provides comments on the educational use of the learning object and provides information on when and by whom the comments were created; 9. classification: describes this learning object in relation to a particular classification system. As it is evident from the above description, the current version of LOM does not include instructional information. That is, learning objects are described rather as content objects, since their instructional “value” is not included in their description. This fact may compromise the value of learning