Defining Reusability

"Reusability is the extent to which an LO can operate effectively for a variety of users in a variety of digital environments and a variety of educational contexts over time. LO reusability is affected by technical, pedagogic and social factors applying to both initial development and subsequent reuse."

Extracted from Palmer & Richardson, 2004.

This definition corresponds to our views and permits us to differentiate three main areas where reusability takes on different values, which in turn helps us understand what type of quality is wanted and needed in order to assure high quality. We propose to look at reusability from these three different aspects, which are further detailed below.

Technological Reusability

Essentially technical reusability is a synonym to technical interoperability and refers to the capacity of the LOR to import and export metadata and standardized protocols holding resources. It also refers the way the LOR manages resources and metadata records and the type of metadata that is used. It involves storing, searching (federated and harvesting) and accessing LO’s in the LOR.

Three quality dimensions can be distinguished, each pointing at quality criteria that must be specified:

• Metadata schema accuracy and appropriateness;
• Technical quality of the LO itself ; Does it conform to educational standards such as SCORM or IMS Learning Design?
• Technical quality of the LOR : Does the LOR allow harvesting, federating according to international standard protocols?

Pedagogical Reusability

Pedagocical reusability here refers to pedagogical aspects of the resource, such as its capacity to be adaptable to different contexts and target audiences as well as its size. Granularity of a resource is a much discussed subject and how small or big should it be to be easily reused or adapted? A commonly found idea is that the smaller the unit, the easier it is to adapt and reuse.

We propose three distinct but common ways of pedagogical reuse, namely to:

• Use learning object as an example or inspiration
• Use the learnig object as is
• Use a learning object by
  • recompose a new LO by putting several together
  • use the instructional strategy or structure of a LO
  • decompose an existing LO to make a new one;

Pedagogical reusability then demands instruments that can ensure the quality for each type of reuse and the possibility to adapt content, learning and teaching strategies used within the LO to other contexts. This is further explored in the Q4R Instrument section under pedagogical factors.

We also invite you to discuss this issue in the Best Practices wiki. (Reusability)

Socio-cultural Reusability

This is a concept that derives from instructional design and eLearning initiatives that essentially points at four important categories to take into account when designing high quality LO. These are :

• general cultural and social expectations
• teaching and learning expectation
• differences in the use of language and symbols
• technological infrastructure and familiarity

These categories are extracted from a paper on 'Cultural Competence and Instructional Design:Exploration Research into the Delivery of Online Instruction Cross-Culturally" by P. Clint Roger, Charles R. Graham and Clifford T. Mayes (1996).

This paper is included in our Q4R Repository and you can easily find entering "socio-cultural reusability" as a keyword.