Experiences with learning objects reuse support tools within the EASEL project

The use of web-based learning support systems is becoming more and more common in educational institutions, be it for running distance learning courses, as well as for supporting activities within traditional curricula. A large amount of educational resources is thus now at hand on the web. From the point of view of course authors and their organizations, a very desirable feature of open content management systems is support for learning objects reuse. However, content reuse is a complex problem, and it is very weakly supported even by most advanced commercial environments. This paper describes some of the experiences being done within EASEL [1], a European Union IST project. EASEL – Educator Access to Services in the Electronic Landscape - deals with data models and web-based technologies for learning objects reuse. One of the goals of EASEL is 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. In this paper we refer in particular to reuse in the context of humanistic university faculties. We describe some issues of learning objects reuse, and preliminary experiences with the EASEL system, involving non computer expert educators from the Philosophy school at our University.