Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubric: The Challenges of Remixing Learning Objects in the Wild

Learning Objects are atomic packages of learning content with associated activities that can be reused in different contexts. However traditional Learning Objects can be complex and expensive to produce, and as a result there are relatively few of these available. In this paper we describe our work to create a lightweight repository for the language-learning domain, called the Language Box, where teachers and students can share their everyday resources and remix and extend each others content using collections and activities to create new Learning Objects more easily. However, in our interactions with the community we have discovered that practitioners find it difficult to abstract their teaching materials from their teaching activities and experiences; this results in Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubrics that can make it difficult for other practitioners to reuse their content and build new Learning Objects.