e-learning standards

The metadata planets seemed to have aligned in recent months and there has been standards activity on several fronts. Sarah Currier’s paper from a couple of years back, Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008, gives a good background to the current environment.

1) Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard

The IEEE LTSC LOM Working Group has reaffirmed the standard and is voting on a list of (minor) corrigenda. Meanwhile, discussions have begun on ‘what next?’ for LOM.

2) Dublin Core Education Application Profile

For the last few years, the DC-Education Community has been working on an application profile for defining the ‘use of properties describing the educational characteristics of a resource’. In other words, other properties are out of scope for this work. The profile will meet the Dublin Core Application Profile Guidelines, which – among other things – means that the Task Group has to specify an explicit domain model of the entities being described. This process has generated a lot of interesting discussion on the community’s email list about what exactly we’re saying when we state that a resource has such-and-such educational property.

3) ISO Metadata for Learning Resources (MLR)

This is a draft, multipart standard being developed by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 36/WG 4 (the final standard will be called ISO/IEC 19788). Part 1, which describes the general framework that is used by the other parts, is up for final committee draft ballot this month at the Working Group’s meeting in Osaka, Japan. Evan and I had the opportunity to offer some feedback on the draft at an extraordinary meeting of the Standards Australia IT-19-1 subcommittee, which has representatives on SC36 (Jon Mason and Liddy Nevile).

Interestingly, the MLR work on a model for its educational elements (MLR Part 5) is happening at the same time as the DC-Education group are discussing their domain model and the two groups are in communication.

These notes by Stephen Downes at an IMS Global meeting in Montreal last year provide a summary of the approach this standard is taking.