LOMEditor: Composition and classification of learning objects

Abstract

The new technologies revolution has led to the emergence of proposals in the field of education to shift to the computer work environment the elements of attendance teaching (computer-based teaching systems). Among these proposals, one notably suggests creating educational resources from minimal reusable units of information called learning objects. This approach responds to the need to reduce development and implementation time of a computer-based teaching system, and to the maintenance/adaptability problem of educational applications (knowledge is created and transmitted progressively, and must be lasting. Therefore it is necessary for the applications to be transferable to another computer system when the system they run on becomes obsolete). In this sense one of the objectives is to simplify the creation of resources down to a simple assembly of existing resources which may be situated locally (in the system itself) or remotely (in other systems interconnected by means of a telecommunications network) [7-8], and constructed for heterogeneous platforms. In this article a learning objects authoring tool, which is being developed as a final degree project, is described. It provides the basic editing and creation of learning objects functions, in addition to two particular functions, namely the composition of objects, and the automatic evaluation and classification of objects. In the following sections a learning object is defined, the principal characteristics of the LOMEditor tool are described, some sections are devoted to dealing with the special functions in greater detail (composition, and automatic evaluation and classification), and, finally, conclusions are drawn and future work is touched upon. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2008.