A Practical Strategy for the Modularization of Courseware

In order to enable courseware reuse, it is necessary to decompose learning materials into manageable learning objects. Most scientific projects and organizations that are concerned with courseware reuse and exchange like Ariadne [2], IMS Global Learning Consortium [4], Educause [3], the IEEE Learning Technologies Standards Committee [8] with its Learning Object Metadata (LOM) [7], and the German Competence Center ”Learning Lab Lower Saxony” (L3S) [6] recognize the importance of modularization for courseware reuse and exchange, but very few address the problem of how to split (existing) learning materials into learning objects. Authors face the problem of not knowing how to determine suitable reusable learning objects in their content. What is the appropriate size of one such an object? Which characteristics must such an object have in order to be described as reusable? Existing approaches do not offer answers to these questions or at most give a theoretical definition of learning object, which authors cannot concretely apply to their content. A typical example is the often cited definition by WILEY: A learning object is any digital resource that can be reused to support learning [13]. It excellently describes what a learning object is, but does not offer any practical instructions by which authors could determine well-sized learning objects in their material. What is missing is an operationalization of the learning object definition offering authors an advice on how to decompose the learning materials into reusable learning objects. A proposal for such a definition is given in this paper. It is based on the idea of describing learning materials along two dimensions: their contents and their resource types. An extended version of this paper is available as technical report [1].