Authoring by Reuse for SCORM like Learning Objects Ramzi FARHAT 1,2 , Bruno DEFUDE 1 and Mohamed JEMNI 2 1 Institut TELECOM, TELECOM & Management SudParis, UMR CNRS-INT SAMOVAR 9, rue Charles Fourier 91011 EVRY Cedex - France ramzi.farhat@it-sudparis.eu , bruno.defude@it-sudparis.eu 2 Research Unit of Technologies of Information and Communication (UTIC) Ecole Supérieure des Sciences et Techniques de Tunis 5 Avenue Taha Hussein, B.P. 56, Bab Menara, Tunis, Tunisia. mohamed.jemni@fst.rnu.tn Abstract We present a new approach called authoring by reuse to assist author during the design of SCORM like learning objects. It is now easy to design new learning objects by reusing existing ones connected together with dedicated operators. But the results are rarely satisfactory mainly due to their lack of consistency. In this paper we propose an assistance approach (i) providing indicators about the new designed learning object organized on three dimensions (complexity, reusability and pedagogy), (ii) computing metadata entries based on the information available about the reused learning objects and (iii) applying a rule based checking to ensure consistency. 1. Introduction 1 Nowadays, with the adoption of standards and specification and with the proliferation of dedicated tools there is numerous learning objects developed and shared. Many tools are designed to support this concept. Numerous authoring environments in compliance with the standards exist like Reload editor [9] or eXe [6]. Repositories such as Ariadne knowledge pool [5] or Educanext [7] are used to support the share of learning objects. Learning management systems have integrated the necessary functionalities to communicate with repositories and to import learning objects. In an eLearning environment learners and authors are the principal users of learning objects. Learners use them to improve their knowledge. Authors are 1 This work is partly funded by the APOGE project (French – Tunisian Utique CMCU) concerned by their use directly in online courses or to combine them with other objects to produce new ones. Several models have been proposed to define such composition such as the SCORM standard [1] or the SIMBAD project [2]. However the reuse of learning objects by authors to design new learning objects is still a challenge. The fact that numerous objects are now accessible in the Internet does not imply that they are widely reused. There are many restraints for reuse, technical ones such as identification of good objects, possibility to adapt them, consistency of compositions, economical and law ones (intellectual property, licenses) and usage ones (in general authors prefer to design a new object and not to reuse existing ones). Another challenge now is how to promote the design of high quality learning objects. Indeed, with the facility of finding, understanding and reusing learning objects to produce new ones, the question is how to evaluate and improve the quality of those composed learning objects. To overcome these challenges, we propose an authoring environment based on an iterative design process and assisting authors to (1) search learning objects (2) compose them to create a new one (3) analyze it in order to give to the author a deep understanding and a precise cartography (4) automatically compute LOM metadata (5) apply rules in order to ensure quality or enforce specific standards defined by the organization. Since that, author can discover eventual anomalies or deficiencies and fix them at an early stage. This paper is organized in three sections. The section 2 defines the context of compound learning objects and hypothesis we made about their description and definition. In section 3 we present the global design process, its different steps and our author 2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies 978-0-7695-3711-5/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICALT.2009.76 165