Depicting educational content re-purposing context and inheritance

Educational content is often shared among different educators and is enriched, adapted and in general repurposed so that it can be re-used in different contexts. This paper discusses educational content and content repurposing in medical education, presenting different repurposing contexts. Finally, it proposes a novel approach to content repurposing via Web 2.0 social networking of learning objects. The proposed social network is augmented by a graphical representation module in order to capture and depict the relationships amongst different re-purposed medical learning objects, based on educational content ‘families’ and inheritance. The ultimate goal is to provide a conceptually different approach to learning object search and retrieval via ‘social’ associations amongst learning objects.