What am I suppose to do with ‘em? I don’t get it: Valuable ways to use Learning Objects in higher education and why

So you kinda know what learning objects are and perhaps you even know a colleague or two that use them but you don’t quite get it yet. Just how are you supposed to go about incorporating them into your repertoire in a way that feels comfortable for you?

There are many ways to utilize learning objects within a learning environment. If you’re new to the game, you might be thinking that learning objects replace you, the instructor. But that’s not so at all. While LOs are an important new tool for instruction, the educator remains the pivotal component in education. It is the educator who is in charge of creating an environment full of intellectual experiences for the student. And part of that role is deciding how to use LOs so that instructional needs are met. Think of your role as the instructional decision maker and LOs as one of many tools used by you to meet a specific learning goal of your course.

Learning Environment Strategies

Oh but with distance learning, LOs do replace the instructor, you’re thinking. Yes sometimes this is true. With online learning courses, learning objects can become the total learning experience where the learning object or module of learning objects make up the entire course. This is one learning environment in which LOs can and are effectively being utilized today in higher education.

Another learning environment option is to use learning objects as a separate, independent activity from the classroom. In this sense, learning objects are used as curriculum support at the student’s discretion. They can be used as supplemental education, as an extended learning environment for students desiring advanced training, or as review materials for students desiring extra support in preparation for an exam. Here LOs assist you by providing students a head start on new subjects being introduced into the classroom as pre-class instruction orientation materials.

A third option is to integrate learning objects into the total course experience. Here, LOs are used both in and outside of the classroom. In the classroom, educators can integrate LOs into the course lecture, as part of the in-class instruction. They can be used as a tool in small groups or independently by students at their own pace. Outside of the classroom, LOs can be used as a focus in a group project activity or used independently as curriculum support, such as homework assignments.

Ok so now you get the general idea of the different ways educators can approach utilizing learning objects but what are some really great ways to use them? Let’s review a few practical and specific uses of learning objects that can be applied to any of the learning environment strategies I’ve just laid out for you.

What to Do with ‘em

• — Use LOs as orientation materials, to introduce new content. Doing so can build background information concerning a new topic, creating interest in unfamiliar subjects. In this way, LOs can help motivate the student to learn new complex concepts and skills. Examples of objects that could be helpful here are: a cd-rom version of the course textbook or a video clip on the new subject.
• — Use LOs as reinforcement materials, to reinforce existing knowledge, concepts, and skills. Current research suggests that it takes 16 experiences with a concept before it becomes gained knowledge. LOs provide an additional practice venue, where students can spend extended time with the material, until the memory process is completed. So not only do LOs promote the likelihood that a new concept will be committed to long term memory, they contribute to extending learning beyond the classroom day. Examples of objects that could be helpful here are: online quizzes, video reenactments of a procedure or skill, and memory games of key words or principles to learn.
• — Use LOs as supplemental text, to enhance curriculum and provide enrichment activities for highly motivated students. LOs can help build background knowledge on subjects you don’t intend to cover in class so advanced students can enhance their knowledge by moving on to more complicated material/skills. Or consider incorporating LOs as assignments for all students, as LOs used as supplements further learning by devising new experiences for the students and adding to their knowledge bank. They present the material in alternate ways, addressing different learning styles to help with comprehension. Examples of objects that could be helpful here are a cd-rom that accompanies current course materials, simulations of scientific experiments such as chemical reactions, and virtual field trips to a location being studied.
• — Use LOs as instructional aide, for illustrating complex concepts and in skill training. Here LOs can be helpful when used where pictures can communicate more than words. A multisensory approach offered through learning objects can help with comprehending complex concepts and explain abstract ideas more clearly than through traditional teaching methods. Having audio/visual reinforcements on a subject can give students additional confidence with the material. Examples of objects that could be helpful here are graphics, simulations, demonstrations, and interactive such as an interactive timeline.
• — Use LOs as review materials, to reduce anxiety and provide focus to key concepts and skills. Here LOs provide a venue to help students prepare for exams so they go into the test with more confidence and reduced test anxiety. Students having trouble can make use of LOs to revisit concepts not fully acquired in order to gain those skills. Students have the opportunity to practice a skill repeatedly, until it is committed to long-term memory. Examples of objects that could be helpful here are interactives, review games and practice quizzes.
• — Use LOs as alternative materials, to support new types of learning opportunities for people with different learning styles. Learning styles are not the same for everyone and learning objects can provide additional paths through a course to reach those students who are not connecting through traditional methods. LOs provide a multisensory approach (text, colors, graphics, sound, interactions) to instruction which can increase the likelihood of students processing the information and gaining a deeper understanding of the material. Students who learn best in independent environments can work at their own pace with the material while those who prefer group settings will find that learning objects provide a great opportunity for group discussion and a more dynamic learning experience. Basically LOs gives educators a new and creative way of presenting the same old material while providing students with a positive and engaging learning environment. Examples of objects that could be helpful here are sound instruction/demonstration as an mp3 file, video clips, mobile applications, interactive diagrams, and group dynamic games.

Now You Get it

Hopefully now you have a good idea of the many ways you can creatively incorporate LOs into your classroom. The next step is to actually give a few of these examples a try. If you are still feeling a bit hesitant, start out by using the second learning environment strategy, by providing learning objects for students to use on their own time and at their own discretion. After you get some positive firsthand feedback from your students, then dive in with two feet and make LOs part of your regular instructional repertoire. You won’t be sorry.

And the next time you hear a colleague ponder out loud, “Oh learning objects, yeah but what do you do with ‘em”, you can confidently jump to the rescue and help them out.

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Becoming a Chunk King: Keys to Selecting LO content that will benefit You and Your Students the most.

You really like the idea of making a learning object for your favorite course and you’re about ready to dive-in, but crap, you can’t quite figure out what to base it on. Sure you could easily pick a subject willy-nilly but you don’t want to go through the trouble of designing an object to discover, after development is completed, that it was all for nothing; the object’s subject no longer really hits on the focus of the course and, as a result, nobody ends up using the thing in the end.

If you are going to make a learning object, you want to feel confident that the one you make is going to prove beneficial to both you and your students. So what’s the problem? After all, you’re savvy. You’re hip to the general notion of LOs and their benefits. You got down the learner-centric model of teaching and know all about the benefits of teaching to multiple styles of learning. Heck, you even know what chunking is. You get it. So why are you banging your head up against the wall?

Picking the appropriate course material to design an LO around can be a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you’ve already decided what kind you’re going to make. Put away those fanciful dreams of creating a super cool interactive timeline or ultra fun game for the time being. Let’s get focused on content selection for starters.

Determine Instructional Goals (Learning Objective = Learning Object)

In determining the content material for your LO, it’s a good idea to first figure out your instructional goals and determine the key needs of the learners, your students. This information will greatly help you narrow in on the subject matter and determine what kind of object to make.

Ask yourself a few key questions to help determine what would be the most beneficial material for your object. First, what is it that you want your students to know/be able to do as a result of the course? Second, what ideas/concepts are the most difficult for the majority of your students?

In order to fully answer these questions you will want to think about the big picture. Make a list of all the instructional goals for the course. Further break these goals down into discrete learning objectives.

After spending some time creating your list, think about which of these objectives seems to be the most difficult for the students to comprehend. You guessed it, turning the most difficult learning objective into the focus of the learning object will greatly benefit both you and your students.

So, from examining the big picture of the course, you have focused on a single learning objective to be – drum roll please — your chunk, the subject of your learning object.

Examine for Solidifiability

Not so fast! We need to finesse things a bit. For starters, as a general rule it is a good idea to select content for your learning object that is unlikely to change drastically over the next several years. This will make the object significantly more cost-efficient, as then there will be no need to redesign the object later on down the line. Otherwise you risk your object/content becoming obsolete before you know it!

How does your chunk hold up? If it’s crumbling, no worries. Reexamine your list and see how you can revise your chunk so it’s solid or pick another learning objective from the difficulty list or keep it as is and accept that it will need regular maintenance.

Moving on. From here we need to determine the kind of learning content you will need to move students from where they are now to the end result of meeting the learning objective. Let’s examine the needs of the learner for some direction here.

Determine Learner’s needs

Learners need their interest piqued to be motivated to learn. Chances are you have not yet piqued the interest and motivated the learner in regards to the content chunk, your selected learning objective. Part of the problem can be that you are not reaching the students’ various styles of learning. As learning styles are not the same for everyone, it is important to provide multiple paths through the course and its content. If your current lesson plan is only appealing to the auditory learner or the verbal learner, for example, you will want to make sure the learning object includes elements that speak largely to the visual, tactile, and/or collaborative learners.

Examine the current course materials you already provide to your students to help them meet the selected learning objective. Which learning styles are you currently catering too? Which learning styles are you leaving out? Are you currently utilizing any learning activities (games, quizzes, videos, etc) to try and reach this goal? If so, what was the result from using them in the past? If students are struggling with the subject, there are some shortcomings. Have you already pinpointed what they are?

Try to determine where your current shortcomings are in helping students achieve the learning objective. If you are having trouble, examine some of the other course learning objectives where students seem to be excelling. Are you utilizing any different strategies there? How about learning activities? What seems to make these strategies/activities successful where the ones supporting your chunk/the selected learning objective have fallen short?

If your current in-classroom lesson hits on one or two learning styles but leaves three or four out, you most likely will want to make sure your learning object utilizes features that speak to excluded learning styles. What does that tell you about the type of object you will create? Does the use of video seem more beneficial to your students’ needs than an online quiz? Would your students benefit more from that interactive timeline you dreamed about or would a game they could play in small groups prove more beneficial?

The idea here is not to decide necessarily on the type of object you will make but to get you thinking about the learning styles you will need to focus the strongest on and how that affects your content. Does it seem like your chunk would have to morph into a massive boulder in order to pull it off? Maybe some further narrowing in on your selected learning objective is needed. Hard to tell, you say. Well let’s focus on how to ressize a chunk.

Resizing the Chunk

Another need of the learner to consider is time management. You must accommodate the busy schedule of the learner if you want your students to actually utilize the tool you are designing. If your chunk/selected learning objective requires a great deal of content, so much so that the resulting object would take more than 15 minutes to complete, then your object is going to be too large to be effective.

You should consider whether or not you have too large of a scope. You might need to reexamine your selected learning objective to see if it can be narrowed down even further into a smaller chunk. And don’t forget the challenge of memory when trying to acquire new information. Will your chunk of content require the learner to hold more than a few things in memory at one time in order to comprehend it? If so, then you need to further refine your chunk.

If you find your subject cannot be further narrowed, then you will need to divide the content into smaller lessons, or subunits, where each subunit is a learning object and, compiled together, they complete the lesson of the selected learning objective. If you are unsure whether or not your subunits are small enough, keep in mind that each subunit should have a completion time under 15 minutes.

Quality Chunk

When resizing your chunk, remember that the narrowing process shouldn’t be about editing out context; you need to provide contextual info to support effective learning. As an educator, you want the learning object to encourage critical thinking. That said you will need to keep in mind when gathering up your content that a limit in size should not limit the quality of information.

The goal of resizing is to break the lesson up into 15 minute chunks or smaller, that are brief and well focused so the LO can be most effective. But if you edit out vital content to reach this goal, then you are defeating the purpose by lowering its quality and ultimately its effectiveness.

While in the process of resizing your chunk, ask yourself if you have edited out valuable content that’s necessary in reaching your overall goals as an educator. The content of your chunk needs to remain sophisticated; you need to use the information and references to skillfully compose the LO so that you both maintain the quality and size efficiency. This way you will optimize the object’s overall effectiveness to foster a competent expression of ideas and appreciate and work with diverse points of view.

The good news is that visuals (including the way material is displayed), can help with comprehension by supplying supporting clues and eliminating needless distractions to help lessen the cognitive demands on the brain during instruction. Keep this in mind when editing content.

Wrapping Up

So far we’ve discussed how to determine the most beneficial content for a learning object, the appropriate size of a chunk, and quality maintenance of its content. For simplicity, this discussion has been centered around the notion that you will be designing your LO for a single course. But chances are you are currently instructing three or four classes a week. With reusability being a key principle behind LOs then it would follow that in choosing the most beneficial content for an LO you would need to consider learning objectives that cross over more than one of the courses you are teaching and to arrive at your chunk that way. By doing this, you are sure to get greater use out of your object. Regardless though, the overall process is the same.

That’s it. You are officially a Chunk King. Now your next steps in designing a learning object is to determine how to best structure, divide, and present the material in the most effective manner. That is a lesson for another day.

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