bjects for Reuse : re Engineering Course (original) (raw)

Over the past few years, there has been tremendous interest worldwide in the concept of a reusable online learning resource, usually referred to as a learning object. The main attraction of learning objects is the potential for reusability in different instructional contexts. If learning objects created by others are reused and re-purposed in generating new content, there is a considerable reduction in the time and effort taken to produce the new content. This leads to a sharp reduction in the cost to produce new instructional materials, compared to developing the content from scratch. The reused content may even be of a higher quality than if developed from scratch. However, to achieve the benefits of reusability, learning bjects must be designe o very beginning of the development life cycle. This paper argues that since learning objects are generally software components such as Web pages, Java applets, and Flash animations, then principles and processes from software engineering a...