Terminologies in Education Teachers, Learners

& Learning Resources

Sarah CurrierCETIS Educational Content SIG Coordinator

Centre for Academic Practice, University of Strathclyde

JISC Terminologies Workshop, 13 February 2004, London

In e-Learning:

Basic similarities- need for widely agreed subject vocabularies and classification schemes – BUT:

Requirement for more flexible updating, curriculum based vs. “pure” discipline based. (JORUM+ - DDC vs. LearnDirect)

Dublin Core (DC-Ed) vs. IEEE Learning Object Metadata Disparate communities coming together now- needing agreement

on approach to vocabularies for metadata elements. IMS Digital Repositories Specification. Developing their own specs for vocabularies now as well: IMS VDEX

(Vocabularies Definition (for) Exchange) Educationally specific vocabularies for attributes other than

subject/discipline – each with its own difficulties. See UK LOM Core, RLLOMAP.

Different levels of education requiring different levels of subject vocabulary.

Cultural differences: expectation of user (learner and teacher) centred design, utilisation of teachers’ expertise, and increasingly, ideas about learner input

See Stor Curam Project – utilising card sort/cluster analysis methodology.

See SeSDL vs. RESULTS portal. See DIDET project- teaching students information literacy with

shared repository- problems with keyword indexing. In e-learning there are a lot of learning resources – from

learning objects to courses – require specialised kind of descriptions

Different types of storage and delivery – repositories, VLEs, etc. Resistance to acknowledging the level of resourcing and expertise

needed around metadata creation in general and vocabularies in particular

Not much expertise yet available for metadata creation or terminology management – although they are beginning to recognise the need for specialist input there are very few librarians/knowledge managers/info. scientists around with the right kind of expertise

See:

+ CETIS Metadata & Digital Repositories SIG – 2 JISCmail lists- one for technical metadata issues, one for cataloguing issues.

http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/

+ Research paper on metadata for elearning & quality- email me or look at above URL.

+ Stor Curam Repository Project:

sarah.currier@strath.ac.uk