e-learning is the haute couture of education.    Key components come and go like ruffs, muffs and makeovers;   today’s must-have methodology becomes yesterday’s yawn.    Fashion is alive and well, and on a computer near you.

So talk that learning objects (LOs), once touted as the way forward, may be falling out of fashion, may be no more than another piece of e-phemera.    Or it may yet prove to be a collective “seeing of the light”.

Of course, objections to learning objects are hardly new.    If you want an excellent summary, try the recent paper from Auricle’s Derek Morrison.    Most of the issues he raises will be familiar enough.    Is moving learning online, and making it modular, simply a smokescreen for not addressing the real issues in education?    Does technology determine practice, rather than facilitate it?    What are the advantages/disadvantages of a self-organising system (in which learners and others create and share their own LOs), vs the central repository?    It’s a sensible, easy read by a man who knows what he’s talking about, who likes learning objects but nevertheless “took the opportunity to 'rattle the bars' just a little”.

Of these objections, David Wiley’s Reusability Paradox is probably the best known and, indeed, probably the most damning.    It states that “if a learning object is useful in a particular context, by definition it is not reusable in a different context.    If a learning object is reusable in many contexts, it isn’t particularly useful in any”;   in short that the concept of a transferable quantum of learning material is inherently flawed.

And Mr Wiley himself has pitched into the debate again, with a blog entry from earlier this month.    “There have been lots of articles around the blogosphere of late”, he notes, “ringing the death bell for learning objects.    It’s hard to tell if they’re right or not, because no one can agree about what a learning object is.    And perhaps that very statement is all that needs to be made.”

He, and several of those who commented on his blog (see the links), argue that the whole debate is a red herring (always presuming a debate and a fish are inherently commensurate, of course).    What matters for him is that educational materials should be openly shared and easy to use.    Well, arguably, that’s true.

But the trend to modularize education and training, to segment the whole into ever-decreasing parts, of which learning objects form just one part, will not so easily be dismissed.    It’s a trend that affects not only materials and courses, but qualifications as well.   

Source:   Derek Morrison
David Wiley bloglet
Comments from Albert Ip
Comment from Teemu Leinonen