By Jenny Thrasher
Digital technology has taken learning resources from the static confines of the old overhead projector to easily accessible interactive experiences that include sound and motion. But despite the dramatic evolution in the quality of learning resources, there has been little progress towards a system of classification that allows educators to efficiently identify, locate, and reuse these materials.
Now, two teams, whose members include researchers and information technology experts from Penn State, are participating in projects designed to bring order to a bourgeoning but chaotic collection of digital educational resources.
At the heart of their projects is a common, indispensable ingredient: metadata. The term may evoke philosophical abstraction, but metadata, or data about data, have many practical uses. Libraries use metadata to help people find books, programmers use metadata to store information, and scientists use metadata to catalog research.
Several years ago, Instructional Management Systems Global Learning Consortium, Inc., (IMS), a group of educational, corporate, and government entities dedicated to making advances in distributed learning, began working on defining metadata to include electronic learning materials to help educators more easily identify and share resources.
An IMS technical board has developed recommendations for the types of metadata that producers of educational material should include in the resources they create, and how they should be included. The metadata defined by IMS includes hundreds of pieces of information from the basic, such as "author," to items that communicate a much greater level of pedagogical detail, like "time spent on the activity," and "semantic density."
The Center for Institutional Cooperation (CIC), an educational consortium of twelve major research and teaching universities including Penn State and charter member of the IMS specification project, hopes to demonstrate the value of the IMS specifications through the development of a prototype repository for metadata.
The CIC Educational Resource Repository (CICERO) project, whose team includes members from a number of CIC institutions, is led by Mike Halm from Penn State's Center for Education Technology Services. "One of the biggest problems we have with first generation digital resources," says Halm, "is that there is no descriptive data associated with the objects. This makes them hard to find."
The CICERO repository is designed to allow users to add IMS specified metadata to materials to clearly identify them, to store the metadata, and to provide a way to search for resources using the metadata that will yield highly specific and accurate results. Users testing the prototype will perform these functions using a Web-based interface.
"There are a number of benefits to users of such a repository," Halm observes. "It exposes their digital resource to a community which might potentially find it useful; there is the potential of revenue from its sale or licensing; it gives developers recognition for their contribution to their field of study; and it may encourage the development of communities in different disciplines to review and discuss such materials."
If the prototype provides the hoped for functionality, it will have helped to lay the groundwork for future repositories scalable to larger groups of users, such as the twelve universities that make up the CIC.
The Penn State Visual Image User Study (VIUS), a project funded by the Mellon Foundation, shares CICERO's goal of helping users more efficiently identify, store, and locate learning resources. VIUS (pronounced "views"), however, focuses specifically on the use, storage, and retrieval of digital images.
The VIUS team, which also includes Halm, will first conduct a detailed assessment of the ways Penn State faculty and students use digital images. It will then use the findings of the study to design a system that will hold both the metadata that describe digital images, and the images themselves.
"Users will be able to search and find digital images using metadata," explains Halm. "Once the search has been narrowed, they will be able to view thumbnails of the images, then select those they want and build collections for a variety of academic or research purposes."
The system will be designed to provide access to digital images created by local faculty and students, as well as to those available through Penn State collections. But the team also intends to design the system so that it may be integrated with digital image retrieval systems at other educational institutions, museums, and public and private collections.
"Accommodating the use of these types of collections into a single educational experience," as Halm describes the ultimate goal of the project, "will be possible in large part due to the implementation of IMS specifications for metadata by institutions with digital image holdings." Halm also notes that the use of IMS specifications will make it possible in the future to integrate the repository with Penn State's Course Management System, ANGEL.
To learn more about IMS and its specifications, visit its Web site: http://www.imsproject.org/