Developing a university course for on-line delivery based on learning objects: From ideals to compromises

http://www.athabascau.ca/schoolnetProject04/
documents/LOB_Final_DraftWilhelm-Wilde3.pdf

I’ve been searching for this paper without being sure it existed – “Two course developers … investigated and described from their personal points of view the complex and immediate challenges they faced as they designed an online university course based on learning objects.”

Somewhat disappointingly, they ultimately “acquired a ‘ready-made’ commercial website featuring learning objects and electronic material embedded in a comprehensive course website.” Still, this paper lays out the details of what appears to be quite a straightforward attempt to create a new online course by finding and assembling resources. The authors are clearly not evangelists for the LO approach, and make clear a number of its current shortcomings and difficulties.

We desperately need more stories like these, as well as far more serious work on what a real ‘learning object design approach’ to create new curriculum out of existing materials might look like (instead of more pie in the sky ‘automated assembly of instructional materials’ scenarios, please!). One of a number of interesting papers from Athabasca University that resulted from their participation in the SchoolNet Project ‘Learning Objects in a Box’ – SWL