There’s something about the notion of reuse that seems to confuse people. They think “reusable resources” like those in an OpenCourseWare collection should “just work out of the box.” We frequently hear about “design tips” for making learning objects more reusable; what we almost never hear about is “design tips” for how to reuse existing materials.
It seems to me that the all-time best example of reuse, the one that all instructional designers should study as a case, and consequently the one about which I am writing a longer piece now, is The Magnificent Seven. This film was, of course, a remake of Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai. Perhaps we (instructional designers) should all be talking about “remaking” learning objects, and not “reusing” them, in order to better communicate the complicated process involved in taking a cultural artifact developed by another person for another audience and trying to make it speak meaningfully to our audience.
As a mental exercise, complete the following statement. Shichinin no Samurai is to The Magnificent Seven as MIT OCW Linear Algebra, Fall 2002 is to _______________.
If you answered either Universia’s Spanish translation or CORE’s Chinese translation, I think that misses the point. Adding English subtitles to Shichinin no Samurai made it slightly more accesible to non-Japanese speakers, but it didn’t make it speak to Americans like The Magnificent Seven did.
It’s surprising how little we instructional designers know about this kind of reuse, what we might call “shichinin reuse” or the art of the remake. It will be very surprising if we don’t figure it out and are still employed in a few years.