From Blocks to Granules: An Alternative Approach to Designing Learning Objects

The idea of creating learning objects, making them reusable and storing them in databases for further use is blooming and becoming a new kind of challenge for instructional designers to quest how to design ldquoreusable, interoperable, and accessiblerdquo learning objects and to put them in a sequence in e-learning environments. On of the challenges is to determine the size of a learning object and a necessary requirement for them to be shared across networks and reused in different learning environments. This paper proposes a model to overcome this challenge by suggesting designing learning objects based on concept and skill ontologies developed from K-12 curricula. By using the learning space as a metaphor, design granules of a learning object has been modeled by separating expectations as skills and concepts.