Search and composition of learning objects in a visual environment

This paper presents a complete visual environment which supports the search and composition of learning objects (LOs). It focuses on the end user, learner or teacher. Learners search for LOs in order to learn a new concept or to follow a lesson. Teachers search for LOs for direct use during their lessons or in order to reuse and assemble them with others, thus creating their own, novel LO. Nevertheless, the inner complexity of an LO makes searching for and reusing composed LOs a complex task as well. The end user has to be assisted during this task. The core of our environment is built with a navigational and iterative query language, and a composition model. An iterative, navigational, query language is a complex language. The end user cannot express search queries directly in such a textual language. In the same way, the teacher cannot use a complex textual language to compose a new LO. Our environment is a suite of visual interfaces, supporting interaction with the end user while hiding the inner complexity of the system. Last, a validation module validates the consistency of a composed LO and provides for the dynamic annotation of metadata.