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of this predated the dominance of Google. This led to the development of a range of standards, all with the noble intention of making learning objects more discoverable and reusable. The ­problem with this approach was that the standards became so c­omplex that they became a barrier to adoption for most academics.

A third significant factor was the sustainability of the approach. Although it made economic and pedagogic sense to develop high-­quality learning objects, they required a critical mass in order to be useful for educators. And achieving this proved problematic. The barriers created by the standards were ­off-​­putting for many educators. More significantly, sharing teaching outputs by contributing to learning object repositories was not part of standard educational practice in the way that sharing research findings through articles was. Acquiring a wide range of objects that would meet the needs of educators became difficult to realise.

These three factors, reusability, standardisation and culture, would partly be addressed by developments both inside and ­outside education. Some, however, were largely forgotten and are now being ‘rediscovered’, particularly with regards to MOOCs, as we shall see in the next chapter. So while learning objects faltered, in some respects they can be viewed as the required first steps in the process of opening up educational content, and were simply too early. The problem of over-​­complex standards for instance was largely overcome with the web 2.0 developments of simple embedding and tagging. Contributing a set of teaching ­materials to a learning object repository and being required to make it compliant with a standard such as SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) and adding a set of metadata may make it very reusable, but the complexity outweighed the benefit. Compare this with saving a PowerPoint file to the Slideshare site and t­agging it with a few keywords, which was an activity educators took to readily.