Quality Metrics in Learning Objects

In today's rapidly evolving society, the range and depth of information available to us is quickly growing which affects educational institutions, who find it difficult to keep their programmes up to date, whilst students struggle to find the right information. The paradigm of learning objects is an emerging technology aimed towards facilitating the managements of the massive amount of (educational) resources available. Enabling users relying on this paradigm to use concise and high quality pieces of knowledge within different contexts represents a key challenge. Therefore, when designing learning objects, reusability must be a key consideration. Bearing this in mind, the current lack of metrics to help measure quality and reusability represents a major issue. Specific metrics for learning objects will eventually appear, probably based on extended and improved metadata. In the meantime, there remains the need to measure the potential reusability of the existing base of learning objects. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by analysing and developing adapted metrics for learning objects, based on existing metrics used in other disciplines such as software engineering.