Content Reusability In eLearning - ICRISAT's Experiments With LMS

• Autores: Sylvester Asil Gerard, Dixit Sreenath, Boyanapalle Diwakar, Sahu Ritesh Kumar, Venkataraman Balaji
• Localización: International journal of the computer, the internet and management, ISSN 0858-7027, Vol. 14, Nº. 1 (AGO), 2006 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Suplemento 1: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on eLearning for Knowledge-Based Society), págs. 12-12
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The World Wide Web has drastically changed the way of information dissemination especially in the field of education, and in particular for open and distance learning. The relatively small investment required to set up a website enabled a great many institutions to become instant content providers. After the initial rush to get online, the challenge faced was to develop an efficient methodology to facilitate knowledge management and sharing. With MIT leading the way with its OpenCourseWare initiative, many other institutions have followed suit by collaborating to form an online grid of educational and outreach materials. The idea of each organization creating monolith digital repositories by using proprietary software and standards without a common data exchange format was a major limitation in collaborative development of e-courses. The solution rested in the use of a new breed of software suites called Learning Management Systems1 . LMS were basically designed to provide an application framework that was mainly meant for offcampus, self-paced learning for class-room based learners. The LMS facilitated interoperability and reusability of the content and learning objects together with giving a more blended eLearning solution, a more coherent total system. This approach of knowledge ondemand has been used by many educational, research and corporate organizations for knowledge reuse with great success. With more and more emphasis and focus on the creation of ‘Metadata’ and ‘Digital Repositories’, standards such as SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) proposed by IMS global learning consortium will play a major role in defining eLearning standards by bringing interoperability and reusability of the learning objects and content between various LMS environments. The power of using digital repositories is that they can be searched, imported, shared, reused and exported between various application platforms in a standard way. In other words, SCORM is to LMS what XML is to the future Semantic Web. Software such as the RELOAD eLearning content authoring tool can be used to assemble and deliver learning content rapidly conforming to SCORM standards. Hence even a ‘conventional’ author could start creating content for eLearning with ease using RELOAD editor. eLearning, using LMS fits the idea of Knowledge On-Demand and Service Oriented Architecture which are the building concepts of Web 2.0 perfectly.