“It’s hard not to fall in love with the notion of reusable learning objects. The idea of a world filled with little self-contained lessons that you can assemble into any course you can think of seems soÂ…wellÂ…cool. How could you not want something like that? Unfortunately, after five years of struggling with the challenge of finding that world, I have come to the conclusion that I am simply not smart enough to lead the way to the Promised Land of e-learning, where milk and honey flow from the earth and learning objects can be plucked like ripe fruit from fig trees. I continue to search far and wide for somebody who is smart enough to lead the way, but so far I’m still pretty much wandering in the desert.
I have therefore set my sights somewhat lower. Rather than aiming to create seamlessly and instantly reusable learning objects, I try to think about which pieces of my e-learning courses are likely to be useful in other courses and whether I can invest a little extra time in the design now in exchange for saving a little more time later. I’m not thinking about reusing my unaltered work so much as I am thinking about recycling it….
I quickly discovered that some of my most basic techniques and habits as an educator no longer worked in the new world of reusable learning objects. In the old world, I could make explicit connections between the ideas in various lessons. I could (and often did) start sentences with phrases like, “As you learned in the previous lessonÂ….” Any decent instructional designer (in fact, any decent writer) knows that using these sorts of connective phrases can be critical to helping your audience understand the bigger picture. But in the new world of learning objects, I couldn’t assume anything about what content the learner had seen previously. Therefore, I couldn’t know what connections I had to make.”
More of Michael Feldstein’s article at http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage/sub_page.cfm?section=4&list_item=5&page=1