The EASEL project and the reuse of digital learning objects

The large amount of digital educational resources available nowadays through the web has brought educational institutions and markets involved, to reflect on an important issue arisen: content reuse. The high cost of authoring good quality, pedagogically rich multimedia resources dictates that they should be highly reusable and available to a wide community of educators. Content reuse is quite a complex problem and it is very weakly supported even by most advanced commercial environments. A current trend in research and development for supporting reuse of learning resources is based on the systematic and expert use of metadata: a fine grained description of a resource to enhance its “found-ability”. This paper describes the experience within the EASEL project on the issue of learning object reuse. EASEL has dealt this matter basing the possibility of reuse on metadata in order to facilitate interoperability and data sharing through time and space. One of the goals of EASEL was to define and experiment tools for easing several of the technically complex tasks that course authors face - while they create courseware from scratch - when trying to locate and reuse relevant material.