Education and pedagogy with learning objects and learning designs

The term ‘‘pedagogy’’ is defined by the Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary as ‘‘the art, science, or profession of teaching’’, and the term ‘‘education’’ as ‘‘(2) the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools’’. These definitions clearly state the methodological aspect of education as the application of certain knowledge and guidelines to the design of learning programs or activities. Recent advances in the standardization of Web-based learning resources have resulted in a degree of consensus about the concepts of reusable ‘‘learning objects’’ and ‘‘learning designs’’. Specifications as IEEE LOM, SCORM or IMS Learning Design among others deal with the description of these kinds of resources and provide models for their construction. Nonetheless, there is still much work needed in the study of the pedagogical knowledge or design guidelines required for the education-oriented design of these resources. Research in that direction includes experimental studies, application of learning theories or pedagogical design guidelines to learning objects, techniques for describing pedagogical assumptions or hypotheses, and critical analysis of the support currently provided by standards to cover the pedagogical perspective. This is the focus of the topic of the papers collected in this issue. The idea of fostering pluri-disciplinary research combining pedagogy and learning object technology came from the experience of a group of Spanish researchers in organizing a conference on the topic in collaboration with Departments of Pedagogy and Psychology and Departments of Computing from several Spanish universities, called originally SPDECE in its first edition in 2004. The pluri-disciplinary flavor of SPDECE raised many interesting questions that were addressed in the 2005 edition of the conference, organized by the Open University of Catalonia, and the third edition that will be held in Oviedo (2006). It also served us to communicate relevant pedagogical issues and results. This resulted in an open call for papers on these topics that attracted more than thirty submissions, including the papers finally selected for this issue.