Maybe I'm having the wrong expectations about Learning Objects / Educational Resources. I started working on that topic more than 10 years ago, and the first 8 years as a researcher investigating what you can do with them, under "optimal" conditions. Recently, I "switched" sides and wanted to use them from a teacher's perspective, but what I find is to 99% not useful at all. Let me explain.
From 2000 to 2007 I worked in the ActiveMath group where we investigated reuse of learning objects, basically what you can do with fine-grained LOs, self-containing, paragraph long, properly annotated with metadata (such as dependencies, difficulty level, type). If you have plenty of those, amazing things become possible, such as automatic courseware generation. The drawback is obviously that such resources are expensive to author, different viewpoints on the metadata, etc. But if you get over such problems within a project, it opens up a lot of possibilities.
Now, since about two years, besides doing research in technology-enhanced learning, I started to teach French in the distant university of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In these few years as a teacher I learned a lot about what you can expect from students and teachers in real life (pdf). In my teaching I face a problem that I also encounter as a language learner (of Chinese). I have a book I need to follow when I teach. So what I am looking for are not complete units, but rather individual content items to supplement my teaching. Additional exercises, activities. I experienced this from my own language learning: very quickly you know the texts and exercises from the text book by heart. So, in order to continue to practice, I need more exercises, specifically training a concept from the target language. A lot of such activities are out there, readily available as Web pages.
But to be honest, for my course, I did not find many helpful resource in repositories (actually I don't remember finding a single one). I searched through a lot of repositories, but for this task, none of them was helpful. Most often, the search functions are too general. Try it for yourself: go to your favorite repository and try to find a resource for absolute beginners in French that trains "articles".
In contrast, very helpful were link lists, like this le point du fle. There, I can search very quickly for activities training the target language concept.
Am I expecting something wrong? I want a search for a domain (French) the proficiency level (beginners), and a domain concept (articles). That doesn't seem to be to difficult metadata, doesn't it? I'm currently writing a little script that generates this metadata automatically.
What is your view on this? Is this a too specialized use case? Did I miss the right repository? Do I need to change my way of searching?
