Tuesday 8 May 2012

Characterising effective e-learning resources: Littlejohn, Falconer and McGill 2008

"Learners construct their own knowledge through these interactions with tutors, other students and the learning materials."
"aggregation offers the possibility of 'personalised' learning systems that identify learner's skills levels and presents them with materials aimed at their current abilities."
"the most commonly used electronic materials ... include articles, book chapters, illustrations and animations."
"'Learning Objects' that could be plugged together to produce a course."
"Learning objects have been rejected by Wiley (2000) as encouraging a simplistic view of learning resources, and a narrow view of education as transmission of blocks of content. He has proposed an alternative metaphor: that of a chemist combining atoms to form molecules."
"not every resource can combine with every other."
Indicators for useful Learning Objects would be "positive evaluation documentation, regular citations within the literature, and widespread adoption within accredited courses."
"metadata describing their potential use."
"much debate about who should produce metadata for Learning Objects."
Resources should be durable and maintained e.g. content in an eJournal over material on an unsupported website.
Quality Assured.
Free from legal restrictions
Formats that are accessible and ubiquitous
Electronic formats or print.
Engage the learner
"reluctance among academics to submit authored resources to a digital repository ... insufficient reward (financial or kudos)."
"that resources at appropriate cost will be adopted if other factors (for example accessibility of language) render them appealing to tutors and students."
"The disadvantage of not being easily repurposed is apparently outweighed by the benefit of contextualisation or of saving time in aggregation."
"Resources should be sufficiently small to be reusable, but large enough to ensure that tutors do not have to spend time aggregating large numbers of resources."
"move away from a narrative presentation of information towards a more active use."
"active learning resources and their sequencing within a learning design or lesson plan becomes more prominent, the profile of dynamic resources is likely to increase resources will need to show how they can be reused in a range of educational models or learning designs."
"inverse relationship between resources being sufficiently large to be of educational value, while being small enough to reuse effectively."
"embraces constructivist principles"
"What may be a positive accessibility characteristic in one situation may be a barrier in another, even for the same subject area and teacher."
"Currently many tutors start by focussing on content and may appreciate guidance in the choice of resource format, medium etc, as well as in consideration of educational design and learner activities through determining the suitability of resources for their teaching."
"their use in context that is important."


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