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T4 - METADATA AND STANDARDS FOR E-LEARNING Maria Helena Braz, Sean Siqueira and Rubens Melo Abstract:
The rapid growth on technology-supported learning has led the community of designers and developers of learning resources to a point where they have an enormous variety of tools to help their work. However, these tools usually use proprietary solutions, making it very difficult to reuse the learning content outside the scope of the system where it was created. It is also very difficult to provide a mechanism for searching, accessing and integrating such contents. The use of metadata has been proposed as a solution to this problem. Addressing specifically the area of e-learning, IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) is working in a IEEE Specification known as IEEE Learning Object Metadata. In this specification, a Learning Object (LO) is defined as "any entity, digital or non-digital, which can de used, re-used or referenced during technology-supported learning". Examples of LO are instructional content, multimedia content, instructional software, learning objectives, organizations and persons. The IEEE LOM Base Document was built over proposals from other standards initiatives like IMS Project, the European project ARIADNE and Dublin Core. Besides these initiatives other proposals are emerging like SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) and EML (Educational Modelling Language). This tutorial presents basic concepts about metadata and its role in searching and accessing information. Discusses the most important and promising initiatives towards setting standards in learning domain, focusing in e-learning. As the syntax language used by many of the proposals is XML, a brief introduction to this language is also presented. Brief
authors CV: Maria Helena Braz is an Assistant Professor at IST - Technical University of Lisbon. Her main research areas are Databases and e-Learning. She is a member of ICIST (ICIST is a R&D division of IST) and works in Information and Design Support Systems Research Group. Recently she has been involved in two main broad projects: eLO-Compose and elearn-Civil. Briefly, the former is related to composing classes from available learning objects, while the later is related to e-learning technology applied to Civil Engineering undergraduate courses. Sean Siqueira is a Computer Science PhD student and a member of the database research group at Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). He has been researching database technology for e-learning for the last years. He is a member of the international project "PARTNERSHIP IN GLOBAL LEARNING" involving PUC-Rio, UNICAMP, FGV from Brazil, University of Florida from the USA and Instituto Tecnico Superior de Monterrey from Mexico, as well as of the eLO-Compose project at ICIST from Portugal. Rubens Melo is a well-known senior researcher and professor in the Database field at Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and recently has been involved in e-Learning research and courses development. He is also a coordinator of the international project "PARTNERSHIP IN GLOBAL LEARNING" involving several Universities. This project develops a multimedia e-Learning Object Oriented Distributed Heterogeneous Database environment for the partners. He has been the Distance Education Coordinator of PUC-Rio for the last 3 years. |
