This page is part of research on the ALOCOM ontology.

Learning objects (LOs) and their reusability are central current research topics within the learning technology community. In various research studies, it is argued that reuse not only saves time and money, but also enhances the quality of digital learning experiences, resulting in efficient, economic and effective learning.

There is an inverse relationship between the size of a LO and its reusability. As the LOs size decreases (lower granularity), its potential for reuse increases. Many shared LOs are however coarse-grained compositions and as such difficult to repurpose. Paragraphs, images or diagrams are frequently assembled manually by copy-paste actions. However, it is possible to repurpose LOs more efficiently, if their components can be accessed on-the-fly. This requires innovative and flexible modeling of LOs.

The ALOCOM ontology is a generic content model that defines a framework for LOs and their components. The ontology defines concepts representing different LO component types and their structure. This explicit definition of both content and structure enables the disaggregation of LOs into their components.

These fine-grained components are the building blocks we need to support flexible content reuse. Support for assembling these components needs to be tightly integrated into standard authoring tools, as users prefer to use authoring environments they are familiar with to create content. We developed plug-ins for MS Word and MS PowerPoint (Figure 1) that enable users to search for components (e.g. images, definitions, slides, text fragments) from within the applications. All components that satisfy the search criteria are shown and the user can incorporate them directly into the LO currently being edited in the authoring tool.

• ALOCoM add-in for MS Word: demo.swf
• ALOCoM add-in for MS PowerPoint: alocom_plugin.swf.