EM2: An Environment for Editing and Management of Educational Metadata

Educational metadata are attracting increasing attention, since they can facilitate the description, indexing, searching and retrieving on-line learning objects and educational resources. This paper describes the difficulties raised in retrieving educational resources from the Web, and discusses the current state-of-theart in educational metadata technologies and the advantages of their use. The most popular software tools for editing and/or managing XML metadata files are presented, and their limitations in the e-learning context are discussed. The paper outlines the design considerations of educational meta-data management toolkits, and proposes EM , an educational metadata management tool, which supports editing and management of XML educational metadata documents. EM 2 aims to facilitate the effective and efficient search, accessibility and navigation of educational resources through e-learning applications and services.