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This made Stanford the latest of a handful of elite American universities to pull back the curtain on their vaunted courses, joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project, Yale University’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.Berkeley, among others. The difference with the Stanford experiment is that students are not only able to view the course materials and tune into recorded lectures for CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; they are also invited to take in-class quizzes, submit homework assignments, and gather for virtual office hours with the course’s two rock star instructors — Peter Norvig, a research executive at Google who used to build robots for NASA, and Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford who also works for Google, designing cars that drive themselves. (M.I.T., Yale and Berkeley simply make the course materials freely available, without offering the opportunity to interact with the professors or submit assignments to be graded.)

MOOCs question the value of teaching as an economic value point.”

Fitzpatrick argues that journals should throw the door open to all comers, then deputize their readers to usher sound articles to a pedestal and banish bad ones to the margins. Scholarly journals would serve their constituencies better “by allowing everything through the gate, and by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received,” she writes, “rather than whether it should be out there in the first place.”

Teaching presence is much harder to facilitate as learners do not necessarily have contact with the educator, but it is the teaching presence that heightens cognitive presence (Annand, 2011).

This research showed the importance of making connections between learners and fellow-learners and between learners and facilitators. Meaningful learning occurs if social and teaching presence forms the basis of design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive processes for the realization of personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes.

The type of support structure that would engage learners in critical learning on an open network should be based on the creation of a place or community where people feel comfortable, trusted, and valued, and where people can access and interact with resources and each other.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce an instructional technology concept known commonly as the “learning object.” First a review of the literature is presented as groundwork for a working definition of the term “learning object.” A brief discussion of instructional design theory is followed by an attempt to connect the learning objects approach to existing instructional design theory, and the general lack of such connective efforts is contrasted with the financial and technical activity generated by the learning objects notion.

What is a learning object?

An instructional technology called “learning objects” (LTSC, 2000a) currently leads other candidates for the position of technology of choice in the next generation of instructional design, development, and delivery, due to its potential for reusability, generativity, adaptability, and scalability (Hodgins, 2000; Urdan & Weggen, 2000; Gibbons, Nelson, & Richards, 2000).