Context, Content and Commodities: e-Learning Objects

This paper is about one of the central dilemmas of e-Learning: can we separate content and context, and how should we manage the relationship between the two? Or to put it another way, are Learning Objects just commoditised learning? With the growth of e-Learning over the past few years, learning objects have come into their own. They are the component units of e-Learning, and in principle can be combined in a myriad of ways into many different courses: Learning Objects are the commodities of e-Learning – they are exchangeable across courses and contexts, and should provide a new and efficient common currency for teaching and learning. If they do, they might be the answer for the administrators and managers of education and training. But will they be the answer for the learners and teachers? e-Learning provides quite new affordances and learning environments which can be understood with help of complex adaptive systems theory.