Abstract:

One of the challenge that e-learning has faced up from its beginning is that of analysing how educational contents should be designed to adapt themselves to the particular needs of each student. To that end, the development of the contents as well as the step to get them by LMS (Learning Management System) should be done on the basis of certain pedagogical and technical requirements. Around this context is where the so-called Learning Objects (LO) come up.

The LO should show some features which enable them to be administrated by a smart system. In this sense, we have to emphasise, their quality of being indivisible, each of these LO cannot be subdivided into smaller objects that could preserve their own meaning, and, inter-operability, that is, the design and structure of these LO which make them compatible with any other platforms. Specification and standardization initiatives in the field of eLearning, direct their efforts to achieve this feature. The final aim we want to approach in the development of these LO is that each of them could be used in different training courses and from different applications and these LO do not need any other context but their own one. A LO develops its own context by combination with other knowledge objects and their content must have its own meaning.

The use of these LO will require the fulfilment of certain rules, to make possible an easier identification and searching, through their standard data definitions (metadata). This must be aimed to increase its indexing capacity, to enable the materials be re-combined and customised to the formative requirements of a concrete group or even of the individual, and on to enable that a LMS could gather the information related to the learning process so it could make a proper students monitoring. The standard with the highest impact in the design of LO is the standard of IEEE called LOM (LO and Metadata). This standard expects to simplify the searching, management and exchange of LO operations into the web; it defines certain metadata which refer to necessary aspects for the management of the distribution, storage and reuse of contents, but it also contributes with other interesting metadata directed to the categorization and description of LO.

When we talk about LO we refer to learning contents and to the process of learning itself. When we use a LO we should think about what to do and how to do it. The LO shouldn’t merely transmit information but they should also respect the instructive strategy that contains all the necessary interactions. LO can be elaborated in a sequenced way, in a gradual increase of complexity. We can also design the LO in a way that one leads to the other which may be of the same levels (horizontal sequence) or of a different one (vertical sequence). All of them should have sense by themselves.

In conclusion, the effort of designing the formative materials in a modular way is the same as the advantages that it provides, since it gives to each student the exact formative contents in the precise moment, obtaining the greatest benefits from the process of content elaboration, since we can take advantages of the interdisciplinary exchange in a cooperative space. In this space, the implied agents obtain benefits, creating an extra value for the rest of the educative community. This is the powerful promise that the technology offers us; to provide the exact information to the precise person in the precise moment.

Keywords:

learning objectives, learning units, learning content, lom.