| This year, society will produce an estimated 10 exabytes of information---roughly double the amount of data required to store the all the words ever spoken by man. Further, the Web now consists of over 300 exabytes of information (35 times the size of the Library of Congress). Within the Web's vast content are millions of learning objects, digital or non-digital entities that may be used for learning or instruction. A learning object might be a photo, paper, lecture, multimedia presentation, simulation, assessment, portfolio, flash card, game, Web site, quote, a course unit, or even a course itself. The vast growth of the information age has created a parallel explosive growth in learning objects. Unfortunately, there is little object sharing and reuse. Typically, most instructional designers do not know that the other learning objects exist, let alone where such objects might reside across the Web, or, how to evaluate and properly use such objects. This study includes the design, implementation, and deployment of a learning-object portal which simplifies and promotes standardized description of learning objects, registration and storage of such objects, and provides a foundation from which developers can build and deploy learning-object-metadata (LOM) tags which describe a learning object. Using the portal, this study measured to what extent instructional designer use of a learning-object registry portal to define a learning object's metadata improved the metadata's correctness and completeness and efficiency compared to metadata created by hand. The study found that the portal's use significantly improved metadata quality and correctness while reducing the time required to implement the metadata. This dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the problem. Chapter 2 provides a review of related literature. Chapter 3 summarizes the project methodology. Chapter 4 presents the study's data analysis. Chapter 5 presents the study's conclusions and recommendations. |
