“The Trouble with Learning Objects,” by Patrick Parrish, in Educational Technology Research and Development
As I review materials for the EdMedia 2004 presentation with Susan Metros in Lugano, Switzerland, I was intrigued by this article which revisited so many of the elements of learning objects that Susan and I discussed in our Educause 2001 presentation, “Promise and Pitfalls of Learning Objects: Status of Digital Resource Collections.” To review that presentation, please visit:
http://itc.utk.edu/educause2001
Parrish covers many of the same issues again, but then pushes the dialogue in new directions with his concept of Object-Oriented Instructional Design (OOID). He frames the promise much as we did: In government, business, and education, we can reduce redundant effort, increase quality of learning materials, reduce/share the costs of creating quality materials, and encourage reuse of expensive, effective products. He notes that this promise “creates contagious enthusiasm.” Indeed it does, for reasons that go way beyond simply cataloguing why LO systems “won’t” work.
By presenting to faculty the concept of learning objects, by encouraging them to re-examine their course content, to break it down into cellular components, you ask them to undergo a reflective process that comes bumping right up against old paradigms, what Dr. Anthony Bates called “the Lone Ranger” model of course development in higher education. The benefit of any discussion that encourages/forces a reframing of unexamined practices is evident. So any discussion of learning objects with faculty will produce valuable re-assessment of content delivery, learning environments, and instructional strategies.
At the enterprise level, talking about digital repositories has the potential to bring to the surface all those issues of turf, territory, and ownership that plague higher education and leave it swamped with inefficiencies. The registrar’s information isn’t available inside the Course Management System. Grade information isn’t readily accessible to departmental advisors. Critical HR information takes a long, inefficient time to move through the system and become usefully available. If talking about learning objects, a university’s intellectual capital, its expensive databases can bring some fresh air into university operations, then the value is considerable. Get that dialogue moving; look for the walls that need swinging doors.
The fundamental promise has always been that computer-based learning, founded on a quality collection of searchable digital resources will make instruction:
• Adaptive
• Generative
• Scalable
All admirable qualities, desired by government, business, and education. All very difficult to achieve in practice. Just a practical note from a conversation I had with one of our programmers. We discussed creating programming script in modules, following certain standard conventions so that re-usability would be enhanced. She was weary of re-inventing the wheel because non-standard programming conventions had been used by a graduate student who had now moved on and failed to document the code. So basically, software engineers as well know that OOP will make program development adaptive, generative, and scalable, but they still often do not code that way in practice, and for very similar reasons: failure to adhere to standards and time pressure.
Parrish notes that the learning object concept has proven remarkably resilient because it is so fundamental to typical ways of thinking about instruction. He then propounds his theory of “object-oriented instructional design” and proposes ways in which metadata can tag a learning object according to the learning conditions it will support and according to which component of which method of ID the learning object supports.
He does honor the small victories that can be garnered through the learning object dialogue. If a local digital repository is used by faculty to try out new strategies and to enhance existing instruction, then a substantial benefit has been achieve, but not in terms of money saved. Another benefit frequently overlooked is that digital repositories may provide access to multiple components of instruction on the same topic, offering students and scholars different interpretations and different experiences. Faculty development efforts directed toward honing students’ critical thinking abilities can benefit from having this use of a LO repository articulated.
A more serious problem identified by Parrish is that the nature of OOID approaches inclines designers to limit their conceptions of learning. A conceptual framework that isn’t flexible limits thinking range. Terms themselves can color how we think about a topic.
The first definitions of learning objects were based on the metaphor of the Lego. The metaphor communicated well in the beginning, but then its limitations became clear. David Wiley proposed the atom as a fundamental metaphor, but while more accurate, it didn’t generate dialogue quite as well as the more popular Lego metaphor. Parrish proposed film montage as a metaphor, and it certainly offers more scope for discussing context of learning and learning theories.
Another overlooked benefit that Parrish touches on only lightly is learning objects as “vectors for innovation.” You won’t get a critical mass of faculty using them with this approach but you might revitalize the effectiveness and the value, the Return on Investment (ROI) of a collection of high quality digital resources. This rich perspective has also been proposed by Stephen Acker of Ohio State University in the co-authored article,
http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7886
All in all, a fine article, with threads that reach out and draw in more components of excellent learning and teachin
