Metadata Standards for Educational Resources

E ach semester, I create Web-based learning experiences for my students by weaving together digital educational resources or learning objects such as videos, images, assessments, simulations, or tutorials. Often I use previously created material, if only I can find it. One current challenge of distributed learning is creating and managing content to facilitate reuse. Instructors as well as students must be able to easily locate existing online content and import it into an authoring system or learning management system. In the 1990s, recognition of the potential economies of reusing educational materials spawned the development of metadata standards for sharing and storing learning objects. Metadata is data that describes a physical or electronic resource and can be used to manage collections of documents , images, and other information in a repository such as an archive or museum. Some metadata elements—such as title, description, subject, and key-words—are similar to those that libraries use to catalog their holdings. Other elements, such as the uniform resource identifier (URI), are specific to a digital, Web-based environment. Metadata can be stored in a digital library or repository that provides services to search or browse for educational materials. The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and IEEE Learning Object Metadata are two popular metadata standards that facilitate cataloging, searching, and reuse of such resources. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (http://dublincore.org/) is an organization dedicated to developing interoper-able metadata standards for a wide range of purposes. Conceived at a March 1995 workshop in Dublin, Ohio, jointly sponsored by the Online Computer Library Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, DCMI holds conferences, workshops, and tutorials throughout the world. As an open forum, DCMI invites participation from all interested researchers and practitioners. Its DC-General mailing list currently has some 1,500 subscribers from more than 50 countries. DCMI operates a number of working groups and is actively working with the World Wide Web Consortium as well as application developers. DCMI created its first metadata standard, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, to facilitate search and retrieval of Web-based resources. Thecludes 15 well-defined elements for describing " core " information prop-Its developers designed DCMES to be simple enough for untrained Web-page authors to use and more extensi-ble than complex formats such as machine-readable cataloging. The standard supports resource discovery across multiple disciplines—including publishing, museum information systems , library science, and knowledge management—and within any type of organization. In addition, through the …