As my colleague Scott wrote recently, the European Standards body CEN has endorsed a “Workshop Agreement” on Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO) [final draft of MLO CWA], and made a commitment to develop a European standard (an EN) based on it. (more…)
Some time back I started a scoping study into a potential Learning Materials Application Profile (LMAP) for the JISC. Well, I have at last written a draft report that is fit to be read by others, for comment.
It is rather long, and I don’t expect that anyone will want to do any more than look at the section that is relevant to your own interests. But if anyone is interested in taking a sneak preview then do please have a look and let me know of anything you spot that is wrong or misleading. (In my opinion it gets better as it goes along.)
I have some more work to do on it, filling in references, adding acknowledgments etc, that will take me a couple of weeks at least. Any comments received before I get those finished will be considered in the final report submitted to JISC.
Update, 11 Dec 2008: Thank you for your comments. The report as submitted to JISC is now available. I’m hoping they don’t want too many changes made.
I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I wanted an example for showing how the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) might be applied to a typical learning resource. I’m not entirely sure that there is such a thing as a typical learning resource, but the OpenYale online lectures seemed seemed like reasonable candidates. I chose one on Newton’s Laws of Motion as my example because it’s a subject I like. I’m no expert on FRBR. If I was I would probably have known better than to choose a complex aggregation of different media types as my example (but would that have been typical?). Anyway, with some help from John Robertson, I came up with the diagram below. (It doesn’t quite model the example: I’ve modelled overhead display content in PowerPoint rather than in chalk.)
I’ve described the modelling and rationale in some more detail in a separate document [pdf].
I would warmly welcome any comments, suggestions and pointers to where I’ve gone wrong.
The story so far: through the learning materials application profile scoping study we are investigating the metadata requirements when storing learning materials in a repository. The first news to tell you is that we wont be finishing at the end of January as originally planned, but will have a draft report available by the end of February. Most importantly at the moment we have a straw man model that we hope to use in the analysis that we would welcome comments on.
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A while back the JISC asked us to investigate the creation of a learning materials application profile, let’s call it LMAP for short. Well, there’s already the UK LOM Core, which is usable despite the latest (and best) version being an incomplete draft. But, as I discussed in my previous post, there have been other developments in metadata for educational resources since then. There are also considerations arising from areas such as assessment, learning design and packaging complex objects that need to be taken into account. So marching on down the UK LOM Core road wasn’t necessarily going to be the right thing to do, accordingly we (Lorna and I) decided to take a more circumspect approach.
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