Study On Instructional Design Models Based On Learning Object

Learning object, as a new form of digital learning resource, has been buzzwords among the e-learning community since various specifications and reference models gradually became publicized by the Learning Technology Standard (LTS) Bodies in 2000. And now academic research of learning object on one hand and development of the commercial application of it on the other are becoming hot topics in a few fields in educational technology.Learning object can be simply said as a type of granule, reusable and digital resource for learning. With learning object, computers will be able to automatically and dynamically compose personalized lessons for online learners.As for now, we have a few specifications of learning object only for its information communication. For instance, LOM (Learning Object Metadata specification) defines certain operable structure of learning object, so that it can be easily located, accessed, searched, sorted and delivered in any Learning Management Systems. And what LTS Organizations are unable to provide with are models and specifications for the instructional design of learning object.For most of the instructional theorist, LOM is not sufficient to make learning object support learning. But on the other hand, we do not yet have readily instructional theories to meet the needs of learning object. It is obvious that we have a new research area, here, the instructional design of learning object.In this thesis, we refer the theoretical models and methods of instructional design of learning object as "Instructional Design based on Learning Object" (IDLO). This thesis is contributed to study on this topic.The thesis consists of five chapters.The content in the first Chapter includes an overview of learning technology standards, discussion about the essential features of learning object, the questions raised from the reality of learning object and an introduction to what we are going to do about it in this thesis.The essential features of learning object focuses on its granularity and reusability. Two basic aspects of the learning object, the media usability and instructional usability, both of which have certain thresholds in value and therefore are nonlinear, are the origin of the global nonlinear relationship between its granularity and reusability. Reusability is only available for a learning object in a so-called "optimal granularity" area. This explicates both the granularity and reusability is distributions rather than discrete values. Another related issue is metadata of learning object. We could get a finer granule learning object by increasing the number of metadata, but the corresponding cost and tagging work would become enormously higher and heavier. In practice, instead, we should seek for a trade off between the development cost and a reasonable reusability.There are two prevailing metaphors to learning object in the literature: one is Lego metaphor and the other Atom metaphor. In consideration of the some flows of the two, we propose the third one which we name it the Word metaphor. This metaphor describes the relationship between the word in a language and various texts composed of words and maps this relationship to learning object and the learning materials it assembled. In contrast, the word metaphor throws more lights on the understanding of learning object, such as, among other things, the hierarchy of learning object, which the well-known metaphors have failed to unveil.We introduce our questions from the reality of LTS by a comparison to the technology of Internet-based e-business. We argue that the present status of LTS is only at the early stage ofselling pizza online. The difference of LTS from e-business is that Internet-based learning involves network-based producing, circulating and "consumption" of learning resource. It is up to instructional design theory to deal with the online production, and learner customized use of learning resource. Further argument leads to a description of what we will do in this thesis and how.We analyze thre...