Phil Barker » LMAP

Metadata for Learning Opportunities

Phil Barker — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:00:07 +0000

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. The CEN workshop agreement on MLO covers advertising of courses and other learning opportunities, e.g. sharing prospectus information and working with agencies like UCAS. Do read Scott’s post for more details.

The CWA is interesting in terms of general education metadata for a couple of reasons:

it is an education-related metadata standard that uses some DC elements (more specifically some of the ISO 15836 “simple DC” element set — it’s not a profile of DC), and
it models things like Learning Opportunity Specification, Provider and Instance, which may have some relationship to the objects relating to educational context and setting which have been identified as important in discussions relating to the Learning Material Application Profile and the DC-Ed Application Profile

Just in case you’re wondering, MLO is not related to ISO MLR or the LOM despite any similarity in the initials, they have a different scope.

LMAP Scoping Study draft report

Phil Barker — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:50:15 +0000

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.

FRBRizing learning materials

Phil Barker — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:57:45 +0000

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.

LMAP Update

Phil Barker — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:01:22 +0000

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.

Our starting point has been that metadata will be required to describe many resource types and to support many activities each of which will be a domain of expertise in its own right. We have now finalized our list of these domains relevant to LMAP, and are talking to representative experts about metadata requirements related to each domain. Feel free to get in touch if you’ve got something to tell us. I hope to be able to put links into this list to the information that we acquire for each domain, so that this will become the working document for the synthesis.

In order to help with the other part of the project, the analysis, I thought it would be useful to have a domain model for learning materials in repositories. The result, on which I would like comments, is a two-part model based on OAIS and FRBR dealing with what the repository does and what the object is respectively. I don’t claim that this is the only view of repositories / learning materials, or that it is the best, but I hope that it is at least a valid view that doesn’t miss out anything too important. Please let me know if you agree or not, either as a reply to this blog post or by email direct to me or to the CETIS-Metadata list if you would like this to be discussed more widely.

Learning Material Application Profile scoping study

Phil Barker — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:55:00 +0000

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.

A typical collection of learning materials is likely to include a wide range of resource types (e.g. images, web pages, assessment items, tutorial-type packages) all of which require description. In addition ther are other factors related to activities such as rights management, ensuring accessibility and preservation that may need to be considered when describing the resources. Expert and advisory groups for most object types and activity domains have developed their own specialized metadata sets and have their own perception of the requirements for best (or acceptable) practice.

We proposed a scoping study that will draw up a list of the relevant domains, identify domain experts for each of them and interview these experts to ascertain the recommendations they provide to repository managers on what would be considered an adequate minimum element set to cover issues arising from their domain. Through synthesis and analysis of this advice we hope to provide managers of repositories of learning materials with an appreciation of the various domain issues they may need to consider and the range of metadata that they might have to accommodate. Additionally, we hope the study will inform advisory services about the range of demands on (finite!) repository resources that may be made by other domains. I see this as being complementary to the approach taken by the DC-Education community: they’re looking at what might go into a modular application profile to describe educational properties; we’re scoping our what the whole profile might look like. Our starting list of domains (and an indication of the metadata involved) is:

general resource discovery (DC, MARC)
Education (LOM, context descriptions)
Accessibility (Access4All)
Curation / preservation (premis, METS)
Complex object management (IMS CP, METS, DIDL, OAI-ORE)
Technical (technical metadata)
Digital rights (ODRM, XrML)
Repository management (admin metadata)
Assessment (IMS QTI metadata)
Scholarly publishing / citations (OpenURL, SWAP, PRISM?)
Images (MIX)
Videos
Geo-spatial

(Which is a long list for a short project.) My first job is to finalize this list, so I would be really interested in receiving comments on it from repository managers, domain experts and others.

This is some work that I am doing for JISC CETIS but in addition to and separate from my regular (part-time) CETIS role of domain coordinator. If you’re interested please get in touch.