Helen Lynch's blog
There is a bit of work happening out there with IMS content packages and ebooks. The Moodle books feature allows books to be exported in this format so it too has the built in capacity for creating durable learning resources and publishing them widely on the web via conversion to ebooks. See more of this at Canberra's Moodleposium11 in late October this year.
Toolbox learning objects could become even more widely portable as e-books. The mind boggles!
Tom Worthington, ACt is doing some work too - check out the blog at
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 12 October 2011 - 6:31am. 
Working with open educational resources (OER): Discovering, reusing and customising learning objects from the Toolbox national learning object collection
Delivered online live via Elluminate through e-Works on Wednesday 31st August 12.30 to 1.30pm.
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 23 August 2011 - 7:46am. Open Educational Resources is a bit of a buzz term in the higher education sector. There is a current research project out of UNE to find out how OER's are being dealt with in Universities in Australia which hopefully will come up with something to guide policy and infrastructure investment in the future.
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 17 August 2011 - 11:57am. I am so excited that the new Vetadata Tool has been finally released! Does this mean that the new VET Reload will soon follow?
Creating vetadata for the learning objects/ learning resources you create is one of the most tedious, headache making and unrewarding activities you will ever have to undertake. The Vetadata Tool is designed to take some of the pain out of the process and it now caters for Mac users as well as Windows 7 - Fantastic work from the developers with eWorks in Melbourne.
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 21 June 2011 - 10:21am. I gave an online Webinar las week to the Aus eLearning community about VET Reload through the Framework's eGems Webinar program. Responses from those attending have suggested that there may be some problems with learning objects created in VetReload and compatibility with Moodle. Is the Vetadata schema at fault? Please Read Tom worthington's blog at http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/05/reload-tool-for-creating-learning.html
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 17 May 2011 - 8:03am. Here is another free elearning content creation program from the UK. It comes as a downloadable program or as an online toolkit and makes learning objects much as eXe and Glowmaker do. However you do do need a little scripting knowledge for this one.
Take a look : http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 13 April 2011 - 3:18pm. Apple Mac internet browsers such as Safari are often set to automatically unzip (or decompress) zipped files as they are downloaded. This applies when you are downloading a learning object from LORN or the Toolbox Learning Object Repository (TLOR) - since these are .zip files - and can cause problems for those of us who then want to upload them to our LMS. The problem is that the Apple Mac unzipping process seems to make the learning object currupt in some way affecting the manifest.xml file - which tells the LMS how to display the learning object.
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 7 March 2011 - 12:18pm. There is an interesting UK learning object project funded by the higher Education Council for England to help university academic staff design, develop and use of learning objects. Partner institutions involved in the project are London Metropolitan University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Nottingham. The project is conducted by RLO-CETL (Reusable Learning Objects, Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) and partners have developed a repository of learning objects in a range of subject ares that can be utilised by non partner institutions.
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 2 February 2011 - 7:23am. Is anyone out there trying to use VET Reload on a Mac? We in the ACT have been having trouble getting it to work on a Macintosh computer. BUT... Marita Mahoney, who is working on a Framework Innovations project came to my Reload session today. She had taken the time to install the original UK Reload Editor on her Macbook and got it working well. If you try this just remember once you have unzipped the file click on the .jar file to make the software work.
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 3 November 2010 - 10:24am. There are a few points to consider when discussing the who, what, when, how and why of learning objects. Impressions are that teachers need the following in order to confidently use LO...
1. Technical skills in ICT...this might mean being familiar with web pages and their institutions OLE/VLE for example.
Submitted by Helen Lynch on 25 August 2010 - 9:32am. 