Learning objects were to bring a seismic shift to the field of computer-based instruction by introducing transportability and reusability. Supposedly outfitted with the concepts taken from object-oriented (OO) design, learning objects have long promised dramatic savings of time and money in course and curricula development. However, they have failed to deliver the return on investment that seems a natural extension of their existence, in large part because the conceptual mechanisms adopted by OO design for transportability and reusability are lacking in learning objects. Object-oriented software development, first discovered in the 1960s, had ushered in a new era of programmatic coding and design by the 1990s. Instead of thinking in terms of “verbs,” or the processes that act upon information, developers could directly conceive of “nouns,” or the objects that define the world around us, and provide these objects with real-world attributes. These transportable and reusable objects would then possess a library of ready-to-use actions that provide both a rich feature set as well as isolation for the user from implementation complexity. Software languages designed with support for such concepts as classes, methods, instantiation, overloading, overriding, inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation, achieved this tectonic shift in computer engineering and resulted in dramatic improvements in reliability, reusability, and cost.