Design and Reusability of Learning Objects in an Academic Context: a new Economy of Education?
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DisintermediationA system is disintermediated when there is no form of assessment or review guiding the selection of learning resources. The purchaser’s only guide to the quality of learning material, in such a system, is obtained directly from the vendor. In a disintermediated system, there is no independent third party available to filter selection, assess or certify materials, or to comment on their potential use. The contrary to disintermediation is intermediation. Some systems, such as merlot, attempt to provide a rudimentary for of intermediation through the provision of peer reviews of educational materials. Merlot’s system, however, is closed in the sense that only a select group of people may provide reviews. And it is limited in the sense that reviewers evaluate only materials found in Merlot. The need for some form of intermediation is evident from the numerous ad hoc mechanisms already in place. Such systems are typically institution-specific and involve the use of proprietary forms and assessment criteria. The system provided by dlnet, for example, provides a specific set of criteria and a review form. It is used only by reviewers rating material for inclusion in the Digital Library Network for Engineering and Technology. (dlnet, 2002) Similar systems are employed by the Peer Review of Instructional Technology Innovation (PRTI) program in the Broadband Enabled Lifelong Learning Environment (BELLE) project and the Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education (DESIRE) project. (Place, 2000) In both cases, the purpose of the review is to establish a scope and selection criteria for the repository. Systems where a review process is intended to select materials for inclusion in a specific repository may be described as “gate-keeping” services. Such services are undesirable for several reasons. First, they create significant overhead by requiring that each item be reviewed manually, causing a backlog in the addition of materials to the repository. Moreover, the results of the review are unavailable to third parties; the reviews are available only to users of a specific repository. Moreover, there is no means in such a system for third party or dissenting reviews. In the case of many other systems, there is no review mechanism available at all. A purchaser of online articles or journal publications from a subscription service has only the article abstract available to guide selection. The reader must pay the access cost in order to determine that the abstract is misleading or that the content is not relevant. Selective SemanticsThough progress has been made recently (with, for example, the IMS Re-useable Definition of Competency or Educational Objective (RDCEO) (Kraan, 2002)), there is a tendency to view the network of learning objects and repositories as a stand-alone service on the world wide web, not integrated with or compatible with many other resources and services available.This is an issue mostly of perception rather than implementation. It results from the presumption that an application profile, such as SCORM, is a standard, and thereby the presumption that SCORM sets out the one and only way to describe learning objects. This has been the basis for much discussion, including heated exchanges surrounding the idea that “SCORM is for everyone.” (Rehak, 2002) In fact, many application profiles, even in the educational arena, exist. (Friesen, 2002) In fact, SCORM is an application profile, which in turn are “schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined together by implementors, and optimised for a particular local application.” (Heery and Patel, 2000) Understood as such, it is therefore unreasonable to expect that any given application profile, even SCORM, would be widely used in multiple contexts. The issue of selective semantics arises when a network application, such as a network of learning object repositories, standardizes on a given application profile. Such specialization restricts the usefulness of such a network to the application envisioned by the designers of the application profile, and thus precludes different (even closely related) applications. A repository network, for example, that standardized on SCORM would preclude from consideration resources which are useful to course designers, such as journal articles, but which may not be described as learning objects per se. Though it is not possible to find a network designed along such principles, there is no shortage of learning content systems proclaiming themselves to be “SCORM compliant.” Viewed in this light, unless such systems are designed to manipulate RDF data, rather than only SCORM data, such systems are announcing merely that they are not suitable for a wide array of applications (though they may be ideal for environments envisioned by the designers of SCORM). Digital Rights MismanagementThe issues related to digital rights management (DRM) are legion and need not be reviewed at length here. That said, since DRM will be an essential component of any network of learning object repositories, it is necessary to survey some of the major issues. The first and probably the most significant concern is that no simple DRM solution has been widely implemented. This is because in many implementations, digital rights management has been conflated with the idea of digital rights enforcement. Thus, for example, the first widespread of proprietary electronic content required the use of specialized devices, known generically as eBooks. Though eBooks satisfied the need to enforce digital rights, they were generally considered a failure because they required the purchase of specialized hardware and could not interoperate with anything else. As Hillesund (2001) notes, “Today there are two factors working against e-books and hindering diffusion. These factors include the overall poor quality and high prices of reading devices and the lack of proper and interoperable digital rights management (DRM) systems.” Insisting on physical control of digital materials stymies the exchange of these materials. (Lyon, 2001) The state of digital rights management for web based resources is not much better. In order to access content, it is typically necessary to negotiate access with each separate supplier. A person dedicated to purchasing online content, for example, may have to obtain separate accounts with Corbis (an image service; http://www.corbis.com/ ), Lexis-Nexus (a clipping service; http://www.lexis-nexis.com/ ) , Salon (a magazine; http://www.salon.com ), and so on and on. In many cases – the most notable being the online distribution of music – there is no means to obtain access to a full catalog of material. The use of clearing houses that characterized first generation digital rights management is insufficient for the wide variety of materials and business models desired in online content exchanges. No trusted fiduciary agent, as described by Lyons (2001), exists to facilitate the exchange of learning resources. Consequently, a fractured and distrusting system of credit-card deposits, proxy servers and disabled file formats has emerged. This has resulted in content that is difficult and expensive to obtain and impractical to use.
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