A general model of learning design objects

Previous research on the development of learning objects has targeted either learners, as consumers of these objects, or instructors, as designers who reuse these objects in building new online courses. There is currently an urgent need for the sharing and reuse of both theoretical knowledge (literature reviews) and practical knowledge (best practice) in learning design. The primary aim of this paper is to develop a strategy for constructing a more powerful set of learning objects targeted at supporting instructors in designing their curricula. A key challenge in this work is the definition of a new class of learning design objects that combine two types of knowledge: (1) reusable knowledge, consisting of theoretical and practical information on education design, and (2) knowledge of reuse, which is necessary to describe the reusable knowledge using an extended learning object metadata language. In addition, we introduce a general model of learning design object repositories based on the Unified Modeling Language, and a learning design support framework is proposed based on the repository model. Finally, a first prototype is developed to provide a subjective evaluation of the new framework.