Developing an e-learning Model for an Industrial Enterprise

Abstract

Until recently, not much effort has been spent on developing e-learning courses with the intention of reuse. Generally, e-learning content developers have not used specifications or standards. As a result, every time a course needed to be developed, the course was started from scratch, even if the contents were quite similar to previously developed courses. This obviously wastes much time and effort and is inherently an inefficient technique. By the introduction of a fairly new concept of learning objects, developing and organizing learning/instructional content into small modules has enabled more organized development. Learning objects are logically demarcated units of content having at least one learning objective. They are independent of other learning objects and communicate their learning objective. Dividing the content into such learning objects and describing them through standard meta-data can make them highly reusable and portable.

There is no existing industry standards based e-learning model that embeds a sound instructional design strategy and automates the linking of personnel in an organization to learning objects. Also, there has been no work done in investigating the costs of a learning object-based e-learning project. This study thus has two main contributions: (1) the development of an e-learning model for an industrial enterprise that is not only specific to the instructional design needs of the organization, but is also compliant with industry standards; and (2) the investigation of the cost differential of an e-learning project developed with learning objects when compared to an e-learning project without learning objects.

The research approach was to develop a course using learning objects and to use the experience to develop an e-learning model that an organization can implement to create and deploy a learning object-based repository and/or curriculum. The reuse of learning objects measured was encouraging as it indicated cost savings. The learning object reuse was found out to be 19% for a single course developed. The results were even more encouraging considering that there was no prior availability of a learning object repository from the course could draw from. Overall, the project costs were saved by more than 15%.