Community Tools for Repurposing Learning Objects

A critical success factor for the reuse of learning objects is the ease by which they may be repurposed in order to enable reusability in a different teaching context from which they were originally designed. The current generation of tools for creating, storing, describing and locating learning objects are best suited for users with technical expertise. Such tools are an obstacle to teachers who might wish to perform alterations to learning objects in order to make them suitable for their context. In this paper we describe a simple set of tools to enable practitioners to adapt the content of existing learning objects and to store and modify metadata describing the intended teaching context of these learning objects. We are deploying and evaluating these tools within the UK language teaching community