An Exploratory Study in the Efficacy of Learning Objects

This article was written by Dr. Farha of Indiana State University which was a study of the effectiveness of Learning Objects in higher education. It examined undergraduate college students from 4 different college environments. The institutions examined were a 4 year coed university, 4 year women' college, a private four year engineering school and a public 2 year community college. The article also went on to define what a Learning Object is, which is an instructional tool that is "subject matter-specific learning resource or item of content, generally understood to be a digital and multimedia based". What the study found was that among those who participated in the learning object exercise the results did not exceed the original expectations. The students in the experimental group only did slightly better than those who were in the control group. Farha's conclusion based on these findings showed that learning objects were still far from replacing regular teachers or other traditional methods such as textbooks.

This article examined the aspect of the Learning Object as a replacement tool for lectures and other traditional methods of teaching. It is true that the new generation of youth are more adept to technology and are more open to different learning methods. But as the study showed it does not matter what is used to teach the subject matter but how it is done. The learning object is only a tool to help educators and there is much room for improvement in order to see the desired results of success. Farha's research was on point but he did not go into HOW well something was taught with a learning tools given or what style of pedagogy was used during that experiment. The experiment was as redundant and boring as the academic lectures he discredited.