A learning object is "a collection of content items, practice items, and assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective". The term is credited to Wayne Hodgins, and dates from a working group in 1994 bearing the name. The concept encompassed by 'Learning Objects' is known by numerous other terms, including: content objects, chunks, educational objects, information objects, intelligent objects, knowledge bits, knowledge objects, learning components, media objects, reusable curriculum components, nuggets, reusable information objects, reusable learning objects, testable reusable units of cognition, training components, and units of learning.
Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based electronic educational technology. It defines communications between client side content and a host system, which is commonly supported by a learning management system. SCORM also defines how content may be packaged into a transferable ZIP file called "Package Interchange Format."
Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system (LMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Developed on pedagogical principles, Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other e-learning projects in schools, universities, workplaces and other sectors.
A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs. The learning management system concept emerged directly from e-Learning. Learning management systems make up the largest segment of the learning system market. The first introduction of the LMS was in the late 1990s. Learning management systems have faced a massive growth in usage due to the emphasis on remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Continuing medical education (CME) refers to a specific form of continuing education (CE) that helps those in the medical field maintain competence and learn about new and developing areas of their field. These activities may take place as live events, written publications, online programs, audio, video, or other electronic media. Content for these programs is developed, reviewed, and delivered by faculty who are experts in their individual clinical areas. Similar to the process used in academic journals, any potentially conflicting financial relationships for faculty members must be both disclosed and resolved in a meaningful way. However, critics complain that drug and device manufacturers often use their financial sponsorship to bias CMEs towards marketing their own products.
The Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) is an organization responsible for the specification of software interfaces comprising a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on high level service definitions.
Fedora is a digital asset management (DAM) content repository architecture upon which institutional repositories, digital archives, and digital library systems might be built. Fedora is the underlying architecture for a digital repository, and is not a complete management, indexing, discovery, and delivery application. It is a modular architecture built on the principle that interoperability and extensibility are best achieved by the integration of data, interfaces, and mechanisms as clearly defined modules.
An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.
Blackboard Learn is a web-based virtual learning environment and learning management system developed by Blackboard Inc. The software features course management, customizable open architecture, and scalable design that allows integration with student information systems and authentication protocols. It may be installed on local servers, hosted by Blackboard ASP Solutions, or provided as Software as a Service hosted on Amazon Web Services. Its main purposes are stated to include the addition of online elements to courses traditionally delivered face-to-face and development of completely online courses with few or no face-to-face meetings.
The Ultranet was an online learning management system developed for the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development in Australia to provide extensive services to students, parents and teachers in government schools. The Ultranet was built by Australian IT firm CSG and phased into school use between 2006 and 2010. Following an audit that found that the Ultranet seriously lacked the features and functionality it was intended to deliver, the Victorian government announced that it would be abandoning support for the system at the end of 2013.
Online tutoring is the process of tutoring in an online, virtual, or networked, environment, in which teachers and learners participate from separate physical locations. Aside from space, literature also states that participants can be separated by time.
Medical education agencies are a specialty subset of advertising agencies that develop educational content for the Healthcare, Life Science and Biotechnology industries. Medical education agencies are divided into two categories:
Chamilo is a free software e-learning and content management system, aimed at improving access to education and knowledge globally. It is backed up by the Chamilo Association, which has goals including the promotion of the software, the maintenance of a clear communication channel and the building of a network of services providers and software contributors.
BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system designed for online learning. BigBlueButton is a tool used by instructors, which helps them access to Learning Management Systems, engagement tools and analytics.
Educational data mining (EDM) describes a research field concerned with the application of data mining, machine learning and statistics to information generated from educational settings. At a high level, the field seeks to develop and improve methods for exploring this data, which often has multiple levels of meaningful hierarchy, in order to discover new insights about how people learn in the context of such settings. In doing so, EDM has contributed to theories of learning investigated by researchers in educational psychology and the learning sciences. The field is closely tied to that of learning analytics, and the two have been compared and contrasted.
NetTutor is a Web-based online tutoring service. The NetTutor website, trademark, and interface technology are owned by Link-Systems International (LSI), a privately held distance-learning software corporation in Tampa, Florida. NetTutor went live in 1996, making it possibly the first private online tutoring service to provide tutoring in which the learner could choose tutoring that is either synchronous, with tutor and learner simultaneously online, or asynchronous, where the learner submits questions and receives a tutor's response via direct messaging. In 2016, the company announced that NetTutor had conducted three million online tutoring session. LSI also developed, maintains, and leases hosted access to the proprietary Java-based whiteboard-style interface with which NetTutor conducts tutoring. All NetTutor operations– tutoring, management, and technical support –are conducted at LSI’s main office in Tampa.
A virtual learning environment (VLE) in educational technology is a web-based platform for the digital aspects of courses of study, usually within educational institutions. They present resources, activities, and interactions within a course structure and provide for the different stages of assessment. VLEs also usually report on participation; and have some level of integration with other institutional systems.
The Open Semantic Framework (OSF) is an integrated software stack using semantic technologies for knowledge management. It has a layered architecture that combines existing open source software with additional open source components developed specifically to provide a complete Web application framework. OSF is made available under the Apache 2 license.
Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is an education technology specification developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. It specifies a method for a learning system to invoke and to communicate with external systems. In the current version of the specification, v1.3, this is done using OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and JSON Web Tokens. For example, a Learning Management System (LMS) may use LTI to host course content and tools provided by external, third-party systems on a web site, without requiring a learner to log in separately on the external systems, with information about the learner and the learning context shared by the LMS with the external systems.
H5P is a free and open-source content collaboration framework based on JavaScript. H5P is an abbreviation for HTML5 Package, and aims to make it easy for everyone to create, share and reuse interactive HTML5 content. Interactive videos, interactive presentations, quizzes, interactive timelines and more have been developed and shared using H5P on H5P.org. H5P is being used by 17 000+ websites. In June 2018 the core team announced that H5P will be supported financially by the Mozilla Foundation within the MOSS program.
