Creating a LO metadata profile for distance learning: An ontological approach

Abstract

The importance of Learning Objects (LOs) in the learning process - especially in the case of distance education - has been underlined significantly in the literature. The ability of administrating LOs in terms of accessibility, reusability and interoperability seems to be ensured by adopting an appropriate metadata schema which fully and adequately describes them. Several metadata standards have been developed such as DC (Dublin Core) and IEEE-LOM. In the context of our work, we explore them and conclude that none of these standards does completely meet the requirements of distance learning material. Therefore, we propose a new metadata schema that is actually an application profile of the widely adopted IEEE LOM and has special orientation in distance education. We also enrich this subset with some additional attributes that represent concepts like learning outcomes. Then, we create an ontological representation of this new educational schema with a view to improving the potential of LOs' discovery and retrieval within an intelligent e-learning system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.