The reusability paradox is a long-standing problem in educational technology (EdTech), positing that: The more generalized and thus reusable a learning resource is made to be, the less useful and likely to be reused it actually is, since it is decontextualized. To reuse a learning resource, it must be recontextualized by the educator. This recontextualization depends on the form of the resource - while static learning resources such as text or images are easily copied, cropped, and generally modified at any granularity desired, fluid recontextualization is not possible for interactive learning resources without programming. To solve the reusability paradox for interactive learning resources, this thesis presents two concepts and a prototypical implementation. First, the software design pattern of widgets is introduced, which combine packages and components into a new approach on the web, using Node Packages and Web Components. Reuse of widgets is possible in several contexts, such as in other code projects, on websites, or in authoring tools. The design pattern is evaluated in development projects with student EdTech developers (n=11) across 5-7 months, where a qualitative content analysis, interviews and questionnaires showed a high degree of usability and expressiveness for the concept. Second, explorable authoring is presented as a new authoring paradigm which extends rich text editing with the concept of self editing for interactive content (widgets). In self editing, widgets provide affordances to make changes to themselves or their content, and changes triggered by user interactions are processed in the widget module, causing a new document state by modifying attributes or the nested content. This is useful for authoring tools, which can provide traditional rich text editing capabilities with insertable elements, a selection, copying, cutting, and pasting, and allow widgets to be changed by the author's interaction. The authoring paradigm is evaluated in three hour workshops with educators (n=23), where a qualitative content analysis and questionnaires indicate usability and expressiveness. Both widgets and explorable authoring are implemented in WebWriter. WebWriter is a web app enabling authors to create self-contained web documents, which can be shared over the web or as files. The authoring interface offers a main editor, a palette with insertable elements, a toolbox with configuration options, an app bar for document-specific commands and information, and a separate settings page. The development interface consists of the documentation on the WebWriter website, a gallery with widgets including their source code as examples, and the live package interface in the main application for development and debugging inside WebWriter. Overall, WebWriter is presented as a prototypical solution for the reusability paradox.
Frederic Salmen (Thu,) studied this question.