First one done!

I spent this morning uploading and playing around with one of the LOs from Jorum. The title is Reading Critically and is an introduction to detecting bias in a piece of written work from the University of Edinburgh Settlement (http://www.sett.ed.ac.uk/). The LO itself is a series of HTML pages containing a piece of text and asking students to answer various questions about bias, so it's got a good level of interactivity. There are also tutor answers and the option to print out the material.

Uploading the zip file and extracting all subsequent files into WebCT was very straightforward. There was a very useful file entitled 'Read me' which held all the instructions about which HTML file to link to in order for the others to work. I set up a folder in WebCT and followed the instructions and all seems fine.

I then had a tinker with the text within the original HTML source page and edited a few sections. This was very easy too and I think that with not much effort an academic/learning technologist could easily repurpose into a subject specific LO.

It may be that for some LOs the hard part will be the pedagogical issues as I spent some time over whether to edit the content to suit a higher level of student, make it more interactive etc. whilst the actual editing was very quick. As with creating learning material from scratch it's all about the planning - who is it aimed at and what do you want them to learn from it?

I think we will need to include a section on aims, learning objectives and other pedagogical aspects in any workflow documents.

More next week when I tackle the rest...!