Work in progress — Collaborative and reflective learning in engineering programs

Learning objects (LOs) were proposed as a way to build reusable chunks of educational content. But in spite of considerable effort by various groups, the approach has had relatively little impact on education. We argue that this is because of a fundamental weakness in the way LOs have been conceived of. We show how the problem can be addressed by borrowing key ideas from object-oriented (OO) programming. We show that the resulting approach will not only help students in learning particular concepts but also help develop their reflective and team-working skills. The approach is also consistent with the ideas of the how people learn (HPL) framework.