Learning Objects and Adaptive e-learning

Have those with experience in Computer Adaptive Testing (e.g. SAT) where each examinee receives a different sequence of items depending on which items are answered correctly ever wonder if e-learning environment may also adapt to the learner with regards to his learning styles and course attempt characteristics? This means the e-learning course will adapt and react dynamically to learner's domain-specific and background knowledge, cognitive and affective abilities, interests and learning targets in the process of interacting with the course. Hence if a learner has got prior experience and interests in game based learning, the course will dish out the relevant game based learning context to him/her. Or if through initial interaction of the course materials, learner's lack of prequisite knowledge is detected, the course will adjust the pace of delivery to strenghthen the learner's foundational knowledge base. Although fully adaptive e-learning is still under development, its success will depend to a large extent on the designed structure of learning objects.

Learnign Objects (LO) are digital resources/content that meet e-learning curricula design requirements and have particular structures pertaining to the learning objectives, subject domains in which the content is relevant in etc. These structures in the form of meta-tags enable e-learning course developer to search and aggregate various LO according to the intended course design into an IMS (some content packaging specification) course package in the learning management system (LMS). In this sense, LO may be analogous to a can of coke. The coke being the content; the can is a standard way of packaging the content. The can’s label is the Metadata, which tells us what the contents are, who produced it, how much it costs, how much sugar and fat it contains, and it has a unique identifier – a barcode.

Whilst LO may be useful for recycling and repackaging various configurations of e-learning courses for reusable and collaborative purposes, the LO the teachers have built up over the years may be limited to a specific LMS if that LMS is not SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) compliant. SCORM is a detailed technical framework with the aim of ensuring that content is interoperable, accessible and reusable across different platforms of LMS.

For e-learning system to adapt automatically to user preferences and needs, it would be logical to map a learning object to learner's characteristics, subject domain and context/task. This would also mean that the LMS must be equipped with learner profiling functions. Future SCORM specification may have the potential of fulfiling such requirements as providing different sequencing types (linear, divergent/convergent) to combine the learning objects and mapping these sequences to the learner's characteristics, subject domain or context/task.

Personally, I've been following on this area of adaptive e-learning and have some experience of developing SCORM e-learning courses that is partially adaptive. By that I mean learner's progession to the next topic of the course is prerequisited by his performance in the prior topic. May the day of fully adaptive SCORM courses be available for our students as they will surely be more motivated and efficient to learn according to their own styles and interests.