Reuse and Repurposing of Digital Content: Understanding the Challenges of Design, Process, People

Digital teaching materials and resources are widely perceived to be more sharable and reusable than traditional printed versions. In the United Kingdom, the current debate on the future of Higher Education has produced a vision of online and blended learning supported by a core of open access learning resources available to universities and beyond. Reuse and adaptation (repurposing) of such content is considered to have the potential to support scalable and sustainable diffusion of elearning within and between organisations. Edge Hill University in the North West of England is one of 20 institutions funded by JISC under its Re-purposing & Reuse of Digital University-Level Content and Evaluation (Re-PRODUCE) programme to test these perceptions in a real-world setting. This exploratory case study reports on the experience of Edge Hill's ReFORM Project and traces the development of an elearning module using teaching content largely constructed from material reused and repurposed from the wider higher education sector. The paper describes how the team approached the module development and analyses the process using a range of evidence obtained from primary sources such as reports and correspondence, reflections of team members, participant observation and learning objects created as a result of the project. The focus of this paper is therefore on processes and people, not specific technologies. Our paper describes the findings that have emerged from a grounded analysis of the data and which have informed our thinking about the longer-term strategies necessary to diffuse wide-scale reuse of digital teaching content within our university. Our own experience suggests that widespread use and repurposing of digital content is dependent upon an emerging digital content literacy to inform a process of deliberate planning for reuse at the initial design stage. It also suggests that curriculum design using digital content requires a rethinking of traditional roles and a broad acceptance of new approaches using non-hierarchical, multi-professional teams who can accept a blurring of roles and embrace the 'messiness' and iterative process.