Learning to share, is sharing to learn

Abstract

The development of e-learning tools for construction education has been continuously growing. However, development of new tools and platforms is costly, time consuming and soon become out of date. This is mainly because of the fast changes in the information and communication technology and their incompatibility with the old systems. As a result, notion of learning objects, which are smaller chunks of learning content, has been developed in order to maximise the sharability and reusability of learning materials. The development of sharable learning objects however faces a number of barriers and challenges. This paper describes such barriers and challenges and also shows a conceptual framework which is developed for tackling the challenges. It then describes the enabling technologies such as metadata, ontology, semantic web and content packages and demonstrates how these technologies can be integrated to develop an environment for sharable learning objects. The paper finally describes the architecture of the learning objects repository which is developed using enabling technologies.

Keywords: content package, learning object, metadata, ontology, repository, semantic web