Categories of learning objects: expository, active and task-based

This lesson isn't something you'll need in your day-to-day, but it's useful as a reference for the future. After all, I doubt you'll go through every learning object I'm about to present in the following lessons right now. There are several ways to categorize them, and it all depends on which attributes you want to highlight. There is no complete classification today and, even in this course, I'll leave some objects out on purpose. Why? Because anything can be a learning object. Think of every format content can take. Got it? That could be a learning object.

In this course I'll cover the ones most commonly seen in educational contexts, but imagination is your best friend here. You can absolutely use email automations, WhatsApp sequences, chatbots, an interactive sliding menu, and so on. Anything you see here, in your browser, has the potential to be applied as a learning object. For your reference, though, in this course we divide them into three categories: expository, active and tasks. Expository learning objects are those that deliver instructions the learner has to absorb, with little or no participation. Texts, interactive videos, slideshows and the like belong here. So far, you've only seen this kind of object. Active objects are those that require the learner to act in order to reveal their information or make their learning explicit. This is the famous "learning by doing." There is an exchange of information between object and learner. Dialog cards, paragraph ordering and word searches are good examples. Task objects are those meant to confirm what the learner has learned. They are often used to reinforce learning or to validate what was covered. Quizzes, drag-the-word and fill-in-the-blank are good examples. After the next lesson, we'll split the course into modules based on this division.