lrmi
What is LRMI Metadata For?
Part of The Content Creator’s Guide to LRMI
Status: draft for comment
We take advantage of the search and retrieval capabilities of computer networks and the Internet every day, and most of the time we get the kind of results we expect, whether through conventional search engine indexing of web pages or through generative AI. In education, however, the existing search and retrieval capacities of these systems are inadequate. Learners and teachers need to find educational resources that precisely meet the their own needs or those of their students. They need to be able to search based on education-specific attributes such as the learner’s age, the academic subject area of interest, the level of learning, the relevance to curriculum standards, learning objectives or competences, or the type of learning activity. LRMI enables the encoding of information that addresses these needs.
But LRMI is not just about search. Discovery of new content alone is not enough to drive improvement in learning. Collections of data about learning resources, learning outcomes, learner information and other variables in the learning ecosystem are being analysed to monitor ongoing learning experiences and inform the design of iterative improvements for future learners. Not only does this support the selection of the best resources for a specific learning experience, but it should also inform the development of curricula and learning resources throughout their lifecycle.
What is Metadata?
“Metadata” is often spoken of as “data about data”. It can be defined more precisely as:
"Structured information that describes, explains, locates
or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage
an information resource".
— J Riley (2004), Understanding Metadata, a NISO Primer
LRMI metadata comprises detailed information that describes learning resources. For example, simple metadata about a textbook might include the publication date, the author, the number of pages, and so on. Metadata does not include the learning resource’s content—the actual text or lesson data from the learning resource. Rather, metadata consists of various statements about the learning resource. Each statement is about a charateristic of the resource such as the number of pages, or about a relationship to another entity such as the author of the resource.
Historically, and with varying success, educational content creators have used metadata to facilitate learning resource discovery within closed systems—that is, within systems over which they have control. In some cases, educational content creators use enterprise scale content management systems (CMS) as workflow tools to develop, manage, and distribute their learning resources, and a key part of the CMS’s success (or not) is metadata. In the past, nearly every organization developed its own approach to metadata, and so the educational content was not easily shareable in open network systems or over the web. In other words, since each content creator’s approach to metadata was unique, there could be no uniform way to search for content from multiple publishers using metadata. One important objective for LRMI was to promote a standard metadata approach, covering how resources are described and how those descriptions are published, in order to enhance the search and discovery of learning resources from multiple publishers in open networks and over the Internet.
Who is LRMI Metadata For?
All learners. Ultimately, of course, LRMI aims to benefit learners, not just those in formal education but anyone who seeking out an opportunity to advance their career or other interest. We hope that they will come with some information about their goals, their current knowledge, their schedule and level of commitment and their preferences for particular types of learning resource.
All educators. We also aim to help teachers, administrators, curriculum designers and others in formal educational and training settings; we aim to help them when they act as proxies for their students in locating suitable material, and to assist them to put the various resources together into coherent experience for their students. As well as an understanding of their students needs, we hope that they will bring an understanding of the curriculum they follow: the scope and sequence of what they wish to teach and assess.
Content creators We aim to help those who create learning resources for any context, including learning designers, authors, resource managers and publishers. We hope they will bring their own approaches to managing the content creation process, their own workflows, repositories and content management systems, as well as an understanding of the role and type of learning resource that they will be creating.
The Uses of LRMI Metadata
Depending on the details of the metadata system, the complete range of learning resources—from textbooks to web pages to media files, videos, games, simulations and more—can be described with metadata and successfully discovered and retrieved. If the learning resource is on the open web, then that resource’s metadata can include a URL pointer to where the asset can be retrieved. Otherwise, the metadata can include information about where it is available (digitally or physically), how it can be purchased, or there can be a URL pointer to a unique landing page that describes the product.
The precision with which suitable resources can be found is enhanced by LRMI allowing the description of educationally important factors such as the educational nature of the resource, the audience for which it is intended, the learning objectives addressed, the amount of time that the resource typically takes to work through, and the educational level of the concepts covered.
Particular attention has been paid to expressing the alignment (or correlation) between learning resources and state and national curriculum standards and, in the case of Competence Based Learning, with skills that are required for proficiency at certain tasks. Some content creators use this kind of mapping to guide their product development process. It is often used as a marketing tool to emphasize the depth and breadth of coverage of learning resources. Closer to the learning activity, it is particularly important for teachers who need to find learning resources that map to learning objectives or competencies addressed within their curriculum.
We also believe that LRMI metadata fits into a learning engineering ecosystem that allows systematic approaches to understanding the interactions between learners, the curriculum and the resources used to learn. In such an ecosystem data on the resources and the curriculum can be matched with measurements of learning to continually identify improvements in outcomes.