Learning Objects: A metadata approach

Due to the convenience of being able to reuse course material, educational research in higher education has been lately focused on the provision of component-based learning, often embodied in the form of reusable Learning Objects. Ideally, it should be possible for teachers and students to select appropriate learning components from a large pool, and combine them to form a complete course. However, without a proper description of learning components from the teaching and learning point of view, it is not possible to make the sound educational decisions required for this process. In previous work we partially addressed this problem by introducing a metadata-based, formal specification of learning objectives to properly describe the educational content of a component, and we established rules and mechanisms to combine these components to form a whole course. In this paper we refine our previous proposal, and we illustrate our formal specification for an introductory programming subject, based on the ACM learning objectives taxonomy in [4]. We then demonstrate how this specification together with a set of inference rules may be used to construct a complete course out of learning components.