Abstract:

Web-based learning has become a common practice in education mainly thanks to the widespread adoption and use of Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Objects. Learning Objects are reusable digital resources tagged with metadata that are self-contained and that can be used for education. They facilitate reuse leading to minimization of production cost, time saving and the quality enhancement of educational resources. One of the essential properties of Learning Objects that facilitates their reusability is that they can be combined among them to build more complex ones forming a hierarchy. The potential of a Learning Object for reuse increases as its size decreases, thereby they should be sufficiently large to be of educational value but also be small enough to be effectively reused.

Learning Objects are usually created through authoring tools, which allow users to create complete educational resources with little effort without requiring them any programming knowledge or high computer skills. Given that the reuse of Learning Objects in multiple contexts is a crucial factor, authoring tools often rely on e-Learning standards such as IMS Content Packaging, SCORM or IMS QTI to ensure the interoperability of their Learning Objects. This way, the created Learning Objects can be integrated and used in any virtual environment that supports the corresponding e-Learning standard.

Many authoring tools have been developed to facilitate the creation of Learning Objects. Nevertheless, these systems are usually limited to creating Learning Objects as independent components, which in most occasions cannot or are very difficult to be integrated with other ones. This limitation prevents the generated Learning Objects from being used as building blocks in order to create new ones, even if they were built conforming to some e-Learning standard. Taking this into account, new e-Learning systems are needed for enabling educators to create Learning Objects by combining and integrating other ones.

This paper presents an innovative model for e-Learning systems that allows to combine and integrate Learning Objects relying on e-Learning standards in order to assemble new Learning Objects. The model allows to combine heterogeneous resources, for instance, Learning Objects created with different authoring systems or according to different e-Learning standards, or even generic HTML5 applications which are not built conforming any e-Learning standard. The Learning Objects created according to the proposed model, regardless of the number of other Learning Objects that were used to build it, will behave as one single activity in the eyes of the virtual environments in which they are integrated. Authors will be able to set up how the final score, progress measurements and success status will be calculated. The created Learning Objects will be able to communicate with the virtual environments through different e-Learning standards in a transparent way.

The model was implemented in an authoring tool called ViSH Editor available on the ViSH e-Learning platform (http://vishub.org), which has been used by more than 700 users for creating more than 2500 Learning Objects. As validation of the model, an evaluation of this implementation will be exposed.

Keywords:

Learning objects, e-learning standards, interoperability, authoring tools, virtual learning environments.