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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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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Does the term “chunk” just leave you in confusion? Are you scratching your head wondering what this person is talking about? Well let’s clear things up so you never feel like blowing chunks again.

In the realm of learning objects, there is a different way to think about learning content. Currently, in-classroom content comes in large units of instruction; you call grouping of content the daily lesson, and it lasts for several hours. The units of content for LOs are much smaller, typically ranging from 2 to 15 minutes, and we refer to them as chunks.

So, in other words, a chunk is the new class lesson when it comes to LOs and like the old lesson style, there are parameters: primarily course objectives, content, and assessment. These independent bits of knowledge, also referred to as granules, generally are stored in a database for learning and can be easily recombined to suit the individual needs of the learner.

But why so small you wonder. Well we develop content in chunks to allow for easier knowledge retention and reuse. Research on the brain and working memory concludes that our memory is so limited in capacity that we can only hold between three to seven chunks of new information at once. If a learner’s working memory is full, the excess information simply will not get absorbed.

Chunking It

Of course there are other factors involved in determining the capacity of one’s working memory, such as the type and features of information, as well as the individual in question. But the basic principle still holds. So the challenge in designing LOs becomes how to explain complex subjects in less than seven bits of info so the learner can actually hold onto the content and understand it. To do this, you’ll need to chunk information into small units. That process or strategy of breaking down information into smaller chunks of knowledge is called chunking.

But how small? Well start by thinking of your entire course lesson as a group of conceptually related information. Then divide this rather large group into many smaller, topic level groups. And there you have your chunk or chunks, as each group, or chuck of knowledge, is an independent lesson just waiting to be turned into a learning object.

Chunk Change

Wait, there’s more. The other key reason for a smaller content size is reuse. Reusability is a key principle in designing LOs and we will talk more on that elsewhere but for now let’s just say that the small size simply makes chunks relevant across disciplines so they end up getting used more often than they would if their content hit on broader topics or contained entire lessons in the traditional sense.

Got all that? Great then start chunking! And if you like a challenge, then try becoming a Chunk King.

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Well there are many great reasons to start incorporating learning objects into your repertoire of teaching tools. Commonly touted benefits include their reusability, their accessibility, and their cost-efficiency. </P

Because they are reusable, faculty members can share them for use in their classes, and students can share them with peers with common interests. Their accessibility saves time and effort because they are easy to locate and retrieve when needed so you get the right information at the right time. This lends itself to advanced customization of content, where you no longer have to take the entire text book when all you want is a single chapter.

The reusability and share-ability of learning objects makes them cost-effective, as you only have to pay once for their development no matter how often you use them. Because of their small chunk size, they more readily become cross-discipline beneficial. This means they are useful to more people and when they get used more often, you really get your money’s worth.

Benefits of a New Way of Learning

But there is an even better reason to use learning objects and its focused on the learning process or the ways that we learn. Traditionally higher education has been an instructor-centric learning environment, where the instructor controls all the conditions of learning (content, learning process, assessment). Recent pedagogical research suggests that uber-controlled teaching styles results in uber-dependent, unmotivated students. Instead the trend is to move towards a learner-centric learning environment, where instructors support students’ ownership of the learning process by facilitating and guiding students in their search for knowledge. In this way, instructors enable students to become partners in the learning process.

Learning objects figure into a learner-centric model of learning, as their modular quality lends itself to a customized learning experience, where they can be mixed and matched to meet individual learner needs and be utilized at a time and place that is convenient for the learner. Learning objects provide students with the opportunity to determine when and how they learn; they encourage student interaction, to engage with the material when it is convenient for them, making any environment potentially an instructional environment. That means learning extended beyond the classroom has never been easier or more effective than with the adoption of learning objects.

The convenience, customization and mobility of learning objects nudge students to move toward a learner-centric model of learning, which is beneficial to both learners and instructors. Because students process information differently, chances are teaching to only one style of learning will diminish student’s comfort level with the subject. Determining the different learning style of each student for a college professor isn’t very realistic. But even if it was possible, such a feat might not even be desirable as it still implies, although customized, a singular approach to instruction. Such an approach encourages a loss of mental dexterity in students, dissuading them to think in different kinds of ways.

A Beneficial Tool for Multiple Learning Styles

To be greatly effective, teachers must reach students on different levels and learning objects provide a simple solution for doing this. Learning objects are a beneficial tool for students of different learning styles, as they present material in ways to appeal to the verbal learner as much as the visual or auditory learner. They provide environments for learning tactilely, independently, and in a group dynamic. For example, students can view and listen to a simulation learning object, read the accompanying text, analyze the situation, and discuss it with their peers.

An interactive learning object on how to perform a specific medical procedure, allows students who learn visually to watch the animation repeatedly to gain greater comprehension. Students of other learning styles can customize their learning by spending more time with the elements that speak directly to them. Tactile learners might benefit more from hands-on interactive play with the animation, in conjunction with reading the accompanying text, while students of other learning styles might benefit more from discussing the material with classmates in a class forum.

The Cool Tool that’s No Trouble

As you can see, learning objects are a pretty cool tool you can use inside and outside the classroom. To sum up, learning objects truly benefit all learners. Whichever way your students learn, a learning object provides them with a tool that speaks to their learning style, that is convenient and that they can practice with repeatedly before actually performing in real life. This new tool gives students options so they can take charge of their learning by catering their lesson plans more effectively to their specific learning styles while, at the same time, exposing them to a variety of learning approaches. As a result of their use, learning objects increase the chances of content comprehension and retention, plus creative thinking.

So if learning objects do all that, then yes, they are worth the bother. But here’s the best part, they are no bother, or rather, they should give you no trouble to use because learning objects are designed to be self-explanatory, without the need to learn new software. With the standardization of learning objects, there is no learning curve on operating them and no software to download. They work independent of your campus’ LMS system, so they are easy to move around, from institution to institution or to an altogether new LMS system. There’s nothing holding you back, so get starting today by using a learning object in your class.

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So you’ve been hearing this term being thrown around departmental talks on ways to incorporate technology into the classroom but what does it mean? Learn-e What-e? Learning objects (or LOs). Oh, and what are they? Well at their most basic level, they are types of media that can be used and reused to support learning. That’s right, learning object is a fancy new term for describing a learning resource. Well you’re already using learning objects then when you bring in your old VHS tapes of movie clips and torn out pages from magazines and photos to illustrate the topic of the day. Well yes . . .

. . . and no. You’re on the right track so getting there shouldn’t be too challenging. It’s true that learning objects can be pictures and movies, as well as documents, simulations, sounds, games or any other type of media. But the media object must have an educational objective; learning must be the primary aim of the object in order for it to be deemed a learning object. Oh! Well that makes sense.

But here is where it gets tricky because not everyone agrees exactly on what constitutes a learning object. Most define it as a digital resource; some learning material you use online , off of a DVD or off of the campus Learning Management System (LMS) (I’m talking Blackboard here or WebCT for the slow to update). But a minority argue that being digital isn’t necessary as long as the object is instructional and supports learning.

Other key defining qualities are that the object must be both a small component (often referred to as a “chunk” or granule), and reusable, meaning that the instructional object can be used many times and in different learning contexts. Small is important because the abbreviated size is more manageable and conducive to an online culture of learning. Also by having objects centered around a single concept, course objective, or skill building exercise, their small size can more effectively lead to their reuse in overlapping disciplines.

OK already, so what are they?

Well they are that movie clip on your VHS tape you mentioned earlier, digitized, with text added to help demonstrate that key concept in your lesson, compiled together and then uploaded somewhere where the students can access it and use it as many times as they like, whenever they like, and wherever they like.

But that’s just one example from a bizillion different things a learning object can be and/or look like. They can be online quizzes, puzzles, games, simulations, animations, audio clips, video clips, slideshows, interactive timelines or diagrams, or any combination thereof. Remember, a learning object can be virtually any digitized resource that aids in learning that you can dream up. Here’s a very short list of ideas to get you thinking:

• match game to identify concepts or theories or build vocabulary
• interactive timeline to be used for history and political science courses
• three -dimensional example of mathematical formulas used in math and science courses
• animated interactive of a medical procedure, where students can read about the procedure, view it in action, and actually interact with it.
• simulations of role-play between a patient and a psychologist to give psychology students a sense of a real-life experience of being in session with a patient.
• a training video/ animation used as a visual tool for learning sign language, foreign languages, job training.

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