OpenEd: Week 12

Jessie said that “I think the open educational resources and learning objects are very similar, leaning objects seems just a newer name of open educational resources in most cases as the time passed.” Yes, I agree that it seems a little hard to distinguish open educational resources from learning objects. In the definition of open educational resources, learning objects are mentioned. However, I think that compared to open educational resources learning objects are more limited for the present online learning environments.

Elisa compared the definition of learning objects from wikipedia, Wiley, and the UNESCO, and mentioned that “one can assume that open educational resources should include, among other things such as full courses, course materials, content modules, collections etc., learning objects as well.” I agree with her, and think that open educational resources bring a broader meaning than learning objects. As I indicated in Week 11 in my blog, learning objects have more limits than the open educational resources.

Elisa also indicated that “Openness, localization and technological improvements are the paths to follow for the future to solve the problems of the state of the art of learning objects.” The idea is great. Keeping learning objects open to users can make them more useful and help the sustainability. Localization makes learning objects more adaptive to people from different cultures.

Greg talked about Artificial Intelligence, and indicated that “the costs right now are too expensive to create such a system for the average instructional design group. When the cost of production is less than the value of what is created, then these systems will be a good idea.” I agree with what he said. If it costs too much to build an artificial intelligence system and doesn’t get many rewards when learning through it, then maybe we will consider another kind of training methods which utilize pieces of learning objects which cost much more less, and probably can bring more to learners.

Houshuang pointed out that “just plugging in quizzes and sections into your course is unlikely to generate a course that is very pedagogical or interesting, it will take reworking and refashioning either way - and the important part is lowering the barriers to reuse, whether those barriers are intellectual property, or file formats, or lack of easy tools.” I agree with him. It would be nice to have the chances to refashion learning objects based on the needs of instruction. Then the learning can be improved.