D7.2.5

=E-learning resources are explicitly designed to support ongoing maintenance and adaptation. =

Evidence
It is argued that a major economic and efficiency advantage of e-learning is its potential for sharing and reusing learning materials (Jochems et al., 2004; Weller, 2004; Wiley, 2000). Also, ongoing design and development of the physical e-learning infrastructure should be done with an awareness of reuse as well as an appreciation of the rapid pace of change and development in this area.

Resources
It is suggested that ‘Repurposing’ rather than ‘reusing’ might be more appealing to academics (Littlejohn 2003). At the University of Durham reusable content has been redeployed across several modules and a range of student activities have also been reused including online discussion tasks, group projects, and simulations. Also course designs that have proven effective are redeployed. At the end of the academic year the course is ready for the next year. Also, the use of metadata is essential to make the resources searchable. This is important because some LMSs are not good at enabling reuse and sharing of resources, so a central repository of reusable and repurposable materials is essential. Many academics complain that learning object reuse drives a reductionist fragmented pedagogy. However, a student centered approach can be taken with reuse of problem-based learning tasks for example.