Concepedia

Abstract

As technologies advance steadily into the educational sector so must teachers’ technical skills develop as they learn to work with them and understand their affordances. Tools for creating interactive online learning materials as webpages or ‘learning objects’ often assume a high level of technical ability in the user as well as an understanding of how to design online learning materials effectively. Although keen to take on new technologies, the classroom teacher may lack these skills. A University of Southampton team have sought to address these problems by creating the LOC (Learning Object Creator) Tool, an authoring tool contains an embedded pedagogic template guiding development of effective online learning materials. A one-day training workshop is sufficient to learn to use it. This paper outlines the development of the LOC Tool, explains the underlying pedagogic approach and describes how it is used by teachers to create learning objects in their own disciplines.