There are now many educational organizations and institutions that have decided to pursue flexible delivery and online learning as strategies. While many educators value online delivery of programs for the flexibility and opportunities offered, the environment offers far more than these outcomes alone. Online delivery supports and encourages very powerful learning environments and has the prospect to transform education if approached in the correct fashion. Across the world, conventional approaches to the design and development of online learning environments in higher education frequently result in many lost opportunities for both teachers and learners. These losses often arise as a consequence of a failure of many teachers to see the big picture when creating their own learning settings. This paper explores this big picture by examining the notion of reuse and recycling in online learning. It explores the concept of learning objects and how these can and should be considered in the design and development stages of online learning. The paper discusses outcomes and presents findings in the context of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework Online Product Development, Review and Evaluation project, a large project seeking to develop world-class online learning products. Characteristics supporting the design of reusable learning objects and challenges to developing learning designs with reusable learning objects are summarized. (Contains 23 references.) (Author/MES)