What is a Learning Object?
The Web is rich with resources that support teaching and learning and you can use them all! While they may all add interest and information to your courses, they do not all meet the criteria that NEAT has adopted for learning objects.
Some online items referred to as learning objects are more accurately classified as raw objects, digital assets or media elements. These items can be photographs, photomicrographs, slides, illustrations, audio or video clips, quotations or other text, charts, tables, graphs, etc. They are small, granular items that do not have a defined learning objective and can acquire meaning or be repurposed through context or aggregation. They may or may not be found in an online repository.
Examples:
The Life Cycle Of Bacteriophage Lambda (found in Merlot)
http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/VL/GG/bact_Lambda.php
Other online items referred to as learning objects are actually fully-developed learning resources that may have more than one learning objective, such as a web site, an entire PowerPoint presentation, an online course or a videotaped lecture. Some repositories include these learning resources.
Examples:
N505 Ethics in Primary Care (found in Merlot)
http://www.sonoma.edu/users/n/nolan/n505/
NEAT learning objects are designed to illustrate concepts about health disparities and patient safety that are important to nursing education. We have also included some learning objects on nursing education from another project. In keeping with the true spirit of learning objects, and in trying to make them as reusable as possible, we have adopted specific characteristics.
The learning objects created for NEAT are:
- self-contained units of digital content
- designed with one learning objective
- retrievable from an online repository
- reusable and repurposeable across courses, educational levels and health-care disciplines
- interactive through application, self-assessment and tracking components
- able to be grouped with other learning objects to form an aggregate of instructional content
- designed to include a summary of the concepts introduced
- interoperable on different learning systems
For other definitions and descriptions of learning objects, we invite you to visit:
http://adlcolab.uwsa.edu/lo/what.htm
http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CIE/AOP/LO_what.html
This project is sponsored in part by The Fund for The Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education.
This project is made possible by support from the UW - Madison School Of Nursing
