Covespot Introduction

Covespot has been created to cater for my diverse interests that range from wooden boats (preferably working boats) to educational technology. Todays focus will be educatiional technology and the Merlot Conference I am attending in Ottawa Canada. Today I have attended a workshop conducted by Liesel Knaack of the University of Ontario.

The workshop was titled "Choosing, using, and assessing learning objects in the classroom". Liesels approach to this difficult topic which followed the 3 themes of choosing, using and assessing'was to have staff and students answer critical questions about their choices before use.

The worshop was very timely for my own research as I encounter these quetions from teaching staff in the Austrálian VTE sector whenever we introduce learning objects to staff udertaking professional development. Generally teachers and faculty are confronted with a very diverse range of learning objects. This makes the task of deciding on suitable learning object/s difficult. An added complexity has been observed in my own research and experiences, that being, teachers and faculty have very little available time to make this very important decision.

This has become the major challenge to staff who design or re-contextualise learning objects. Key strategies to assist the design of useful learning objects are;

• there needs to be a clear instruction or objective stating the learning expected to be gleaned from the learning object.
• there needs to be engaging and interactive activities that enable learning in reference to the objective.
  
• the activities should also encourage collaboration between student as well as student and teacher.
• finally the learning object needs to have some form of assessment so that the student and teacher can measure the learning.

Liesel also spoke of the term "Instructional Wrap" which she uses to introduce and sometimes to conclude on a short learning sequence or experience. I tend to call this "contextualising". That is palcing one or two web pages before the learning object to provide instruction about the context in which the teacher prefers the student to consider their learning. By then placing a page following the learning object the teacher can summarise the learning experience and ask students to post discussions about their learning experience. This would support stsudent collaborative learning.

Liesel has provided some excellent tools to assit teachers and faculty to choose use and assess learning objects.