Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

From Brent's blog, some very nice online contents have been funded by Education Commission's e-Learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF) in New Zealand. The learning modules are task-based, very clean and fast. I enjoyed reading through the testing module - Essay writing with readings. According to Brent, these online contents will be made freely available across the tertiary sector in New Zealand and will also be available as SCORM packages for loading into LMS systems.

Over a day long discussion at “Learning Object Interoperability Working Group Meeting”, organized by Scott Leslie, BCcampus, many challenges have been laid down on the table and many solutions were generated. One thing raised in the meeting was how we can overcome the “lack of sharing” mentality.

Over the years of instructional development practices, I realized one unique trend – the smaller the learning object is, the more willingness of sharing by the authors. Content creators are usually ok of sharing bits and pieces of their courses rather than the entire course as a whole package. This is understandable, while others collect and choose to re-use the “smaller” pieces of objects, they must put in their own intellectual procedures to re-assemble them into usable learning materials. This process is usually respected as a proper “re-publishing” process. Anyway, in simple, I believe us e-Learning developers should keep this in mind and always make sure the contents are modular and broken down to “smallest chunks” possible for the maximized re-usability.