Learnometrics: metrics for learning objects

The field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in general, has the potential to solve one of the most important challenges of our time: enable everyone to learn anything, anytime, anywhere. However, if we look back at more than 50 years of research in TEL, it is not clear where we are in terms of reaching our goal and whether we are, indeed, moving forward. The pace at which technology and new ideas evolve have created a rapid, even exponential, rate of change. This rapid change, together with the natural difficulty to measure the impact of technology in something as complex as learning, has lead to a field with abundance of new, good ideas and scarcity of evaluation studies. This lack of evaluation has resulted into the duplication of efforts and a sense of no "ground truth" or "basic theory' of TEL. This article is an attempt to stop, look back and measure, if not the impact, at least the status of a small fraction of TEL, Learning Object Technologies, in the real world. The measured apparent inexistence of the reuse paradox, the two phase linear growth of repositories or the ineffective metadata quality assessment of humans are clear reminders that even bright theoretical discussions do not compensate the lack of experimentation and measurement. Both theoretical and empirical studies should go hand in hand in order to advance the status of the field. This article is an invitation to other researchers in the field to apply Informetric techniques to measure, understand and apply in their tools the vast amount of information generated by the usage of Technology Enhanced Learning systems.