eBlog by Tore Hoel

The editors of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 WG4 MLR Part 5 (in English, the guys trying to come up with a new ISO standard describing educational metadata for learning resources) are discussing how to model the top level concepts of Part 5 of this multipart standard. A few weeks ago the decision was made in Paris that the MLR standard should be in alignment with Dublin Core Abstract Model, building on the entity-relationship model of RDF. Thus we have a flexible model that allows for extensions/refinements, and the task now is to come up with a simple and lean top level model that has the chance to survive the turbulent and emergent practice of technology enhanced learning.

At the present stage a study of JISC-CETIS’s Phil Baker has been of great help. The Learning Material Application Profile Scoping Study is available in draft from Phil’s blog. My proposal for the next editors meeting is to use the model Phil comes up with a starting point to discuss the top level concepts of MLR Educational.

First, some insights found in Phil’s report. He points out that metadata for education is one of the domains where the issues are least well articulated and where solutions are least developed. His study shows that where resource descriptions were seen as “difficult” there seems to be suggestions to move away from structured metadata towards the approach of providing semi-structured free text descriptions. This should be seen as a warning signal to SC36 colleagues who want to be too explicit in modelling educational metadata. We are making an international standard that should cover the needs of all educational levels in all regions and cultures throughout the world, a truly daunting task!

Phil is of the opinion that any future work should recognise that metadata may be valuable in supporting resource management, discovery/retrieval and use. And he reminds us that the application profile to support resource discovery might be quite different from an application profile to support resource management or use.

Therefore, we should come up with use cases that show a number of scenarios:

• The Provider role
• The Management role
• The Consumer role

The last role should not just cover the users of repositories in a strict sense, but also reflect the emergent use of learning resources through participation in different Communities of Practice, in digital living and serendipitous learning, i.e., the discovery use case.

Furthermore, Phil has a concept of the Primary Resource, the Learning Material; and the Secondary Entities that are related to the learning material and which have properties that need to be specified in order to provide full description of the primary resource. This is similar to my concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic properties of a learning resource. However, Phil uses the FRBR model to unpack the intrinsic qualities of the learning resource.

I have copied the model Phil Baker has made to illustrate what is described by metadata for learning materials. Whether we in MLR Part 5 should bring into play the full Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entity model is to be discussed. I would think that this will vary according to the needs of different communities, and that in some application profiles you will find the full model, and in others a reduced set.

What we should discuss, is this simple model, defining a learning resource by Subject, Audience, Agent and Educational Context.

We should list the metadata elements that the different National Bodies have launched as candidates for the new standard, and see if we are able to place them as refinements of these top level concepts, e.g., audience language, educational level, accessibility preferences, pedagogical modality, competency or learning outcome, etc.

The tricky bit will be to tackle the redundancies in this model, e.g., is educational level a property of Audience or Educational Context. Or is Audience in fact a property of Educational Context? I bet this discussion will show that this depends on the use scenarios, and that we will not be able to come up with a model that is completely streamlined at this stage of learning technology development.

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