Bank of Objects for Learning

The design and construction of digital educational materials to facilitate the teaching-learning process is an inherent task of teaching. Proposing content, with the intention of promoting a student's competencies for training in a specific area of knowledge, and turning them into Learning objects is in itself an activity that can aim to improve the quality of education and share them with other members. of the community would make it possible to strengthen collaborative work.
A Learning Object is, according to the Colombian National Ministry of Education, “a set of digital resources, self-contained and reusable, with an educational purpose and made up of at least three internal components: content, learning activities, and contextualization elements. The Learning Object must have an external information structure (metadata), which facilitates its storage, identification, and retrieval ”.

At first, before they were properly called Learning Objects that help edit my paper, their structure was defined in such a way that they were created as reusable resources in different academic contexts since they were thought of as units of knowledge with complete meaning, which they offer within their contained all the elements necessary for its development and understanding. This principle evolved over time, changing the way these objects were developed, through the incorporation of more elements and the connection with other learning objects, considering both their pedagogical and technical value, thus seeking interoperability2 with other environments and knowledge areas.

It is ideal that these objects are reusable, that is, that other teachers can use them in different contexts and for different educational purposes, in addition to adapting or modifying their components to create their own objects from existing pieces. It can be built from the foundations already laid by other objects since the main characteristic of these is that they are self-contained, which means that they must make sense by themselves and be self-sufficient to fulfill the learning objective for which they were created.

With the aim of grouping all this knowledge to make it both accessible and filterable from the same place, the Repositories of Learning Objects were born (called Bank of Objects for Learning or Boa in the University of Antioquia). These can be defined as a mix between a digital library and a search engine3. They allow to store and consult Learning Objects from all areas of knowledge. The objects stored in these banks must meet the basic characteristics of any Learning Object, being duly classified and cataloged according to their content, study area, and academic purpose so that their recovery in the bank and subsequent use in the training processes be easy and dynamic.

Having the Boa of the University of New York, which freely offers its collections, allows teachers to have access to a large number of resources on various topics, as they are creations of interdisciplinary groups and expert professionals in each area of knowledge. Not only do they provide a greater number of educational resources that they can use in their work, but they also allow the exchange of content and the sharing of individual and institutional production. They also encourage the production of new objects.