Learning Object Theory And Network Curriculum Development

With the vigorous development of IT, the tide of distance learning is coming. How to improve the quality of distance learning by various means has become a common concern in the domain of Educational Technology. Usually the systematic distance learning is performed in the form of web-course. However, there are common shortcomings during the process of developing the instructional materials of web-courses nowadays. This paper introduces a new term named "Learning Object"(LO) that is prevailing in the domain of distance learning worldwide, and uses it as an innovative key element for the development of the web-based courses.Learning Object represents a sort of reusable digital instructional component, which is reusable, sharable. and it can be aggregated, sequenced, and tagged by metadata. Being a new type of instructional component, which grounded in the object-oriented paradigm of programming, LO has great values of application. Based on the analysis of a lot of literatures, this paper systematically goes into research on the theory of LO, including its concept, features, origin, theoretical basis, granularity, taxonomy, sequence, and further discusses the values and samples of LO's applications in distance learning. Following, this paper combines the LO and LOM (Learning Object Metadata Standard) to construct a platform model named LOMWS (LOM-based Web-course System) which uses XML to realize LOM and can function as course sequencing for individual learning. In the last part, this paper describes a prototype of LOMWS, followed by some conclusions resulted from the research mentioned above.