The second workshop for the day was presented by Lisa Waits of e-Works which is an offshoot of Kangan Batman TAFE and manages a number of programs for OTTE (VET Govt department in Victoria).
Lisa spoke about the transition of the ANTA Toolboxes into Learning Objects. Starting with an outline of the educational foundations of toolboxes which include:
- virtual workplaces
- immersive learning
- problem based learning
- facilitated, mediated learning experience
- collaboration is encouraged
- resource rich.
In the new Series 7 Toolboxes ...
... the development is moving more towards a learning object (LO) approach and Lise defined a LO as 'any digital resource than can be used to support learning'. It should contain a learign sequence of some sort, an activity, and a learning outcome, and will generally be smaller than a unit of competency.
Whilst new toolboxes are focussed on LOs, they will also be packaged in such a way that all resources can be bundled and provided to learners on CD as the current ones can be. Some welcome discussion ensued about how contextualised or decontextualised a resource can be, whether we should be contextualising, how small a LO can be withouth it being too small. No real answers were pinned to the table, but the general feeling was that we should not contextualise too far, or too little. Just how long is a piece of string??