This has turned into rather a long e-mail, but in short it says:
Avoid putting the navigation between your resources inside the resources
themselves.
Choose instead to use a SCO builder like Reload to gather your materials
together and provide the navigation structure.
------
The rest of this e-mail tries to define why you should do this.
The above guiding principle has been developed through other people's
experiences over time (though some of this experience is from in house
training in companies rather than educational)
FIRST, a health warning on nomenclature
---------------------------------------
There are lots of terms floating around, and no-one really knows what any of
them means to other people, and even to the same person, the meaning will
vary according to context. For example, in learnwise I am forced to use
"courses" for things I would think of as learnng objects (e.g. the NLN
materials), But a course when I am talking to our MIS people is a course of
study leading to a qualification and, probably, an associated chunk of
funding.
Course
Module
Unit
Learning Object
Shareable Content Object (SCO)
etc....
NOW to the matter at hand
-------------------------
Although most of these items is therefore ill-defined, a shareable content
object (SCO) is quite well defined structurally (if not pedagogically) and
therefore, I am focussing on this.
A SCO is a package of resources with its own internal navigation that
conforms to a reference model (SCORM - Shareable Content Object Reference
Model).
A SCO is designed to be contained within a compatible (SCORM compliant)
Learning Management System (LMS). This could be your own, an open source
system such as Moodle or a proprietary one such as Blackboard, Learnwise
etc.
The guidance says that a SCO should have a single point of entry, and should
be entirely self contained - that is, the only way to leave it is to return
to the LMS from which it was entered.
I think this is why Learnwise does not make provision for external URLs in
SCO's, even though, perversely, a way to do this IS defined in the Reference
Model.
The important thing about an SCO is that it is shareable. Because it is only
dependent on its surroundings in very well defined ways (SCORM) it can be
re-used in new situations.
This has important implications pedagogically. In order to gain the benefit
of re-usability, SCOs need to be designed so that the material within it is
also re-usable.
In general, the smaller the bite of learning, the more widely re-usable it
is. This is why the NLN objects have changed. In round one, the NLN SCOs
were very large.
Each NLN unit was a single SCO. It put a single item in the LMS' menu. This
led into the entire NLN unit which had its own internal navigation through a
large volume of material.
There was no way of re-using part of the material if it happened to be
useful elsewhere, it was an all or nothing situation.
Now, with the newer NLN materials, you can open them up in, say, Reload, and
re-purpose components of the NLN Unit.
There are two other pieces of this jigsaw, whic hI have not mentioned:
1) Metadata - describing the SCO celarly enough that it can be found by
someone who might find it useful
2) Flow control - controlling the order and pace that students work their
way through the material.
SCORM defines metadata, and Reload etc allow it to be edited. however, there
are a number of models for defining the metadata and you need to choose one.
It does not (AFAIA) define flow control. There's a standard for this too,
but at this moment, I can't remember what it is called. Many of the LMSs are
working on implementing it. I am not sure which ones have succeeded yet.
***************** List information: *****************
Remember - replies go by default to the entire list.
Access the list via the web on http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/vle.html
The Ferl VLE Focus Area is at http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?page=76
To unsubscribe, email [log in to unmask] with the message: leave vle
|
