Learning Resource Metadata

Something that bothers me sometimes is the poor search results yielded when one looks for educational resources. So many good projects I know of simply don’t show up in a simple Google search no matter what keywords I add into the search field. Results, in generalm are often irrelevant and require a lot of filtering to finally find GOOD learning materials. That is probably true for intranets in institutions as well.

While the issue goes beyoond finding relevant content,  the lack of a framework for assigning relevant metadata to learning resources (especially on the Web) affects other aspects of learning objects such as accessibility.

There are several metadata projects that aim at being universal in nature such as Microformats, as well as several others dedicated to the taxonomy of learning objects alone. Often, these are too complex. That’s where I think the Learning Resource Metadata Inniciative (LRMI) project comest in play: it claims to make learning object metadata simple. LMRI is an innitiative led by the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons that is worth keeping an eye on.