A reusable learning object (RLO) has been defined as ‘any digital resource that can be reused to support learning’ (Wiley, 2000). As such, digital learning objects can be considered to be the Lego™ bricks of a teaching session delivered via, for example Microsoft PowerPoint or a VLE. They may include learning/information objects such as text, digital images, photographs, video or audio clips, animation sequences, question-answer activities, case scenarios, web pages and simulations. Since many of these objects already exist in digital archives, the concept of reusability – i.e. the opportunity to save time and money by sharing these resources between institutions, between courses, e.g. medicine and nursing, and between course levels, e.g. undergraduate and postgraduate – becomes very attractive. To enable this to happen these Lego -like components must be collected into digital repositories, catalogued and described by adding appropriate metadata so that they can be readily identified, made available for easy downloading and then assembled by the teacher to meet local needs a process analogous to the same set of Lego bricks being used to build a house or a car. However, making it easy to access learning objects is only the first step. To transform a collection of RLOs into a learning activity such as a lecture or an e-learning course requires particular instructional design skills. The process a teacher employs to assemble the RLOs into a learning activity may be similar to the step-wise Lego guide for building an assembly of different sized and shaped bricks into a specific model. In the educational context teachers could either use an exemplar of a learning activity constructed from a defined set of RLOs if the outcomes of the activity met with their own or they could assemble different components to produce a new learning activity which met their needs. The final stage concerns embedding the learning activity into a course. One strategy to facilitate this process is to help teachers to develop ‘wrap-around’ materials which provide the context, assessment and give ‘ownership’ of the materials to the teacher.

This presentation will focus on a UK Government-funded (Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Exchange for Learning Programme (X4L)) project (ACETS at www.acets.ac.uk). The project is led by the University of Edinburgh but involves a number of other UK HE and FE institutions and aims to investigate and evaluate how RLOs can be successfully implemented in the support of medical and healthcare professional education. The initial stages of the project will focus on the implementation of a selection of RLOs from anatomy and communication skills and will involve: creating a central repository with internet access (A = ASSEMBLE); developing methods of cataloguing and adding descriptive metadata (including learning object descriptors (type of object, author(s), year etc, MESH-compliant descriptors, pedagogical descriptors, IPR descriptors)) to the RLOs, and ensuring that they meet international interoperability standards to facilitate their ready availability to users and systems in many different situations (C= CATALOGUE). Teams of experienced teachers will be commissioned to develop ‘wrap-arounds’ for selected RLOs and so assemble a learning activity/course to meet their local needs. The building process will be monitored and the resulting RLO assembly/learning activity will be used as an exemplar (E=EXEMPLIFY). The development processes and the impact on student learning will be evaluated (T=TEST). The final stage will be dissemination of the project outcomes (S=SHARE).