Developing a Metadata Profile for Higher Education OER Repositories

Abstract

To provide Open Educational Resources (OER) according to the recognised FAIR principles (improve Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets), it is necessary to describe the educational material by means of meaningful metadata. There are conflicting demands to comply with. On the one hand, the educational resources should be described in as much detail as possible for accurately fitting search results. On the other hand, only strictly necessary information should be obligatory to keep the obstacles for authors as low as possible. An additional goal is to allow easy connection between repositories, thus allowing federated search and harvesting of metadata, for example, by search engines or other interested parties. Operators of OER repositories from several federal states in Germany (HOOU, OERNDS, ORCA.nrw, VCRP, VHB, ZOERR) have developed a metadata profile focussing on OER in the context of higher education. The initiators strive to reach the mentioned objectives and to establish a standard in the field. The metadata profile is based on the well-established Learning Object Metadata Standard (LOM). The chapter describes the decision process and why certain choices are made to reach the intended goals. Furthermore, the importance of editorial supervision for a sound quality of the material and metadata will be discussed. The chances and challenges are illustrated based on practical experiences with the establishment and daily operation of the Zentrales OER Repositorium der Hochschulen in Baden- Württemberg (ZOERR).