Achieving reusability in e-learning

Reusability is one of the most desirable features of modern teaching/learning approaches and especially e-learning. Historically, this issue was tackled by standardizing metadata and packaging formats for electronic learning materials. However, it has been shown that this is not enough and that the pedagogical basis is for each piece of learning material crucial to its success. Instructional design techniques allowing teachers to describe and subsequently reuse whole teaching/learning scenarios have therefore been developed and they currently are on their way to becoming standard practice. This article provides an overview of instructional design techniques and a novel approach to achieving reusability of learning materials, further increasing possible benefits of instructional designs, is presented.