What are Learning Objects?

Learning objects differ to the traditional “several hour chunk” style of learning. They provide smaller, self-contained units of learning. Typically learning objects will include an array of different components; including instructional content and assessment. In most cases, learning objects will include a variety of media content and some form of interaction.

What About Reusable Learning Objects?

Reusable learning objects (or RLOs), in the most basic sense, are simply learning objects that can be reused in some way. Subject-specific RLOs could be reused for different cohorts of students, or made available for the wider academic community through open repositories, such as Jorum. Generic RLOs, covering topics such as research methods, could also be shared across programmes, allowing staff to scaffold learning around them.

RLOs are often defined as needing to allow users to adapt their content, in order to re-purpose them for their own localised needs. Designing a learning object to allow for this requires careful consideration at the conception stage, and as such, should in fact, be described as a “generative learning object” (GLO).

What Tools are Available?

Although you don’t need to use specialist software to create learning objects, the following tools are available if you wish to use them:

• Xerte Online Toolkits
  Create packaged RLOs that run in a web-browser. Xerte is easy to use, and allows for a wide-range of different content types (e.g. text, hypertext, image, audio, video) as well as providing templates for user-interaction/assessment.
• Screencasting
  Great for embedding in Xerte (or PowerPoint) you can create interesting video clips to back up your arguments, or explain difficult concepts.