Transforming existing content into reusable Learning Objects

This article will address the question of how to deal with the reuse of existing course materials within the realm of a learning object (LO) economy, both on the level of individual subject experts and the broader organisational level. Since the success of the idea of a LO economy will highly rely on approved standards, we will further compare the examples from the literature with the IMS learning design, more specifically with respect to the smallest reusable objects defined in these approaches. After deriving recommendations and constraints regarding LO design, the third section will describe the process of decomposing existing material in terms of checks and analyses that have to be made successively.