A system for the sharing and reuse of learning objects

Nowadays, Web-based learning become one of the most important components in educational technologies and has been widely employed in both educational and non-educational institutions. However, many of the Web-based learning systems are closed system and use private internal format. The learning materials may be dispersed and stored in database or on the server's file system, therefore the learning materials are not easy to be extracted and reused. The downloaded content often cannot be operated as they were on the server. Therefore, sharing and reusing learning materials is an important issue but not an easy task in real world applications. In addressing the above problem, we proposed the information object model used to construct an information system for the mothballing, sharing, and reusing of digital contents. In our developments, two subsystems were implemented. The two subsystems developed apply the information object model to build and share the learning objects which comes with the benefits of portability, extensibility and reusability. One of the subsystems is used to build and compose learning objects. The other subsystem implementing a information object storage service can be used for sharing learning objects on a large scale. In this paper we will describe the important concepts and principles in the design of the system. We will present concisely the system used to build and share reusable learning objects.