Cultural Issues in the Sharing and Reuse of Resources for Learning

It has been argued that the reuse of educational resources will contribute to the development of economies of scale in which users, both learners and teachers, can create, source, and share knowledge and information. Central to this objective are Learning Object Repositories (LORs) that can support resource reuse within and across learning communities. The uptake and use of LORs by communities will be influenced by a number of sociocultural factors that are difficult to distinguish and solve, since they involve a number of interrelated, tacit variables. In this article, we discuss three case studies outlining a range of actual and potential cultural issues affecting the implementation of LORs. We present a framework that can support systematic identification of these issues in the design and development stage and guide future implementations.