A strategy for achieving learning content repurposing

Abstract

The development of instructional content using new Information Technologies is an expensive, time-consuming and complex process that points to the establishment of new methodologies. It was in this context that the concept of Learning Objects (LOs) was proposed as an approach that promotes content reuse. However, if content is conveyed in small LOs, they must be combined and sequenced in order to build more elaborated and complex content. This paper presents a strategy to deal with this problem based on the definition of smaller LOs, which represent not only content but also practice, here called Component Objects (COs). These COs are structured and combined according to a conceptual metamodel, which is the basis for the definition of conceptual schemas representing the existing material. Considering these ideas the paper presents a strategy for searching, extracting and sequencing COs, which supports a teacher/professor to better control the implementation of a complex content such as a course, reducing errors and eventual omissions in the authoring process. Finally, a case study that shows the proposed approach and some results of using the algorithm are presented. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.