Review Material in Instructional Design
It is important to review any existing materials to determine if they can be adopted or redesigned into the program. This not only includes material developed in-house, but also material developed by third parties.
Whenever possible, the duplication of materials must be avoided to save resources. Also, you should review any existing material relative to the new program to see if it needs to be updated or discarded. Care should be taken not to select material just because it is available. For example, there are probably several thousand instructional VCR tapes floating around that were developed, not because they were the best media or methods for the presenting the instruction, but because a camera and VCR were readily available at the time and everyone wanted to get in on this new technology. This same phenomenon occurred during the early stages of elearning.
Reusable Information Object (RIO)
An Reusable Information Object or RIO is granular chunk of information that is capable of being used again and is ideally created to be delivery media independent. The ideal is to design and development an RIO once so that it can be delivered in multiple delivery mediums. Each RIO is a collection of content items, practice items, or assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective.
Reusable Learning Object (RLO)
Individual RIOs are then combined to form a larger module, normally a lesson, called a Reusable Learning Object (RLO). An RLO is normally composed of content items, practice items, and assessment items.
Training courses have traditionally been built as large, monolithic processes that are difficult to repurpose into searchable learning objects for reuse in other learning platforms. Where as an RIO/RLO strategy addresses this problem by designing content into smaller objects that can be repurposed when needed. The goal is to create small chunks of information that helps learners to build knowledge and skills and then be able to use these "chunks" in other learning platforms when needed so as not to "reinvent the wheel."
References
Barritt, C., Lewis, D., Wieseler, W. (1999). Cisco Systems Reusable Information Object Strategy: Definition, Creation Overview, and Guidelines. Version 3.0. Retrieved from web on May 2, 2009: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779/ibs/solutions/learning/whitepapers/el_cisco_rio.pdf
Clark, R., (1989). Developing Technical Training: A Structured Approach for the Development of Classroom and Computer-Based Instructional Materials. Performance Technology Press.
Next Steps
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