A quick search on Google™ for learning and information objects will find you straddling two domains:
- learning management
- knowledge management
For the purpose of this course, learning objects
and information objects are used interchangeably. Purists will suggest
that learning objects are associated solely with learning management and
information objects are associated solely with knowledge management. Whatever
the case, the point is using and reusing objects
to build understanding for e-Learning courses, decision support tools,
and reference guides.
An object is a chunk of information that does not have a standard size. However, the larger the learning object, the harder it is to reuse as the content contained within a large object can be too general.
Take this lesson for example. It is a learning object that contains approximately 430 words and is focused specifically on one learner objective. This particular object would be ideal if you were building another course and needed to explain the concept of Reusable Learning Objects (RLO).
Rather than building a separate lesson in the new course, you would simply "reuse" this object to explain RLOs. In other words, the lesson would not exist in two or more separate places, it would reside in one location on the file server and be called (reused) where appropriate.
Other examples of reusable objects are the navigation buttons
at the top and bottom of the lessons in this course. As you learned in
the previous lesson, all images that are shared (reused) across all courses
are stored in the high level images directory of the knowledge bank. Therefore,
you do not have the navigation images stored separately in each course's
directory. Rather, they are called from one location.
Not only does this save storage space on your server, it can be a real
time saver if, at some point, you want to change the look and feel of
the navigation elements. To do so, you would simply make the changes in
one location to affect all of the courses that share the elements, rather
than having to change them in each course.
Click here
to revisit the directory structure interaction we looked at in the earlier
lesson to see where the high-level images directory resides in the knowledge
bank. By doing so, you can see how we are using the interaction as a RLO.
In other words, Lesson 4 and Lesson 5 are using the same object that exists
in one location.
EXAMPLE 1: The diagnostic tool RiceDoctor uses RLOs to provide information for users after symptoms have been diagnosed. To see how this works, click here.
EXAMPLE 2: The e-Learning course, Rice Grain Quality, uses RLOs
to reinforce concepts as well. To see how this works, click here.