Abstract: Building Reusable Learning Content and Tools

Increasingly faculty need to build educational materials that can be reused and repurposed across a wide range of learning environments. In the “old days”, faculty would dust off last semester’s PowerPoint, fix a few typos, upload it to a campus learning management system like Sakai or Canvas, and walk into lecture. Increasingly, our learning content includes course assignments, specialized software to help with assessments, video materials, formative assessments, supporting materials, etc. And for each course, on each LMS, you needed to upload and format your content and place it into a “course shell”. But now at many campuses, there may be several learning platforms and one or more MOOC platform like Coursera. It is a lot of work to re-author your course content in three or four learning platforms. But with the widespread adoption of LMS interchange standards like IMS Learning Tools Interoperability, IMS Common Cartridge, and IMS Content Item, we should be able to author content once and easily integrate into as many learning platforms as needed. This talk will explore research into developing easy to use learning object repositories and learning application stores that enable this “write once – use anywhere” model of learning content development.