Learning Resource Types in LRMI — Sharing and learning Phil Barker's work

It took a while, but we now have in LRMI a Learning Resource Type concept scheme that defines a controlled vocabulary of terms that you might use to describe the type or nature of a learning resource.

Why it took a while: what is a learning resource, and what is a type?

Aside from everything in metadata being harder than you first think, and having less time than we would like, the main reason it took so long (and it took, like, a few years) comes down to aspects of what is a learning resource? and what it a type? Some folk maintain that there is no well-defined class of “learning resources”, anything can be used for learning and teaching, and that trying to describe different sub-types of “anything” is going to be a fruitless task. Pedagogically, I have no argument with the statement that anything can be used for learning and teaching, but for information systems that is not a useful starting point. I have seen repositories crash and burn because they took that as their collection policy. Telling people who are looking for resources to help them learn maths that they can use anything, just be imaginative in how you use it, is not helpful.

By way of analogy, pretty much anything can be used as a hammer. Somethings will be better than others, the ones that are the right weight, hard and not brittle, but I’ve used stones, shoes, lumps of wood, monkey wrenches and so on as hammers with some success. That doesn’t mean that “hammer” doesn’t exist as a category, not does it mean that it isn’t useful to distinguish a peen hammer from a sledgehammer from a copper-headed mallet. Not that I am easily distracted, but I have found plenty of shops that not only sell hammers as a distinct type of tool but they have a fascinating array of different types of specialist hammers.

Our first step to resolving this discussion was a couple of years back when we agreed to define a class of Learning Resource as:

A persistent resource that has one or more physical or digital representations, and that explicitly involves, specifies or entails a learning activity or learning experience.

So, not just anything that can be used for learning and teaching, but something that is meant to be used for learning and teaching.

Intuitively it seems clear that there are different types of learning resource: lesson plans are different to textbooks, video lectures are different to assessment items. But how to encapsulate that? Is something an assessment because it is used for assessment, or is there something inherent in some resources that makes them assessments? Likewise is a video lecture a different type of thing from a lecture or just a different format? The answer in each case is sometimes yes to both. The use of something may be strongly correlated to what it is but use and type are still distinct. That is fine: we have in LRMI a property of educationalUse, which can be assessment, and now learningResourceType which can also be assessment. Likewise, the format of something may be correlated to what it is: textbooks tend to include text; a video recording of a lecture will be a video. Again that is fine, we have mime types and other ways of encoding format to convey that information, but they won’t tell you whether something is a text book or a children’s picture book, and not all recordings of lectures will be videos. So learning resource type may be correlated to to educational use and format without being the same.

Principles adopted for the LRMI Learning Resource Type vocabulary

As with all our work in LRMI, we adopted a couple of principles. First it should focus solely on what was relevant to learning, education and training: other vocabularies deal well with other domains or generic terms. Second, create small vocabulary of broad, a high level terms to which other people can map their special cases and similar terms: those special cases are often so context dependent that they frequently don’t travel well. Related to both of these, we mapped our vocabulary to terms in two others: CEDS and the Library of Congress Genre/Form terms. The links to CEDS terms are useful because CEDS is well established in the US system, and we provided pre-existing terms many of which we adopted. The link to the LoC terms is useful because it links our terms into a comprehensive list of generic terms. LoC terms are an example of one of the vocabularies that you might want to use if you are describing things like data as learning resources: we don’t cover it because data as a learning resource is not distinct from data in general, but we are all linked data here, and when providing resource descriptions you can mix terms from our scheme with those from others.

Using the LRMI Learning Resource Type vocabulary

The vocabulary is expressed in SKOS, and so it ready for linked data use.

If you manage your own list of learning resource types using SKOS, we invite you create links to the LRMI concepts and thus improve interoperability of learning resource descriptions. We would be interested in hearing from you if you are in this situation. Perhaps you have suggestions for further concepts; you can raise an issue about the concept scheme if that is the case.

If you create learning resource descriptions you may reference this vocabulary in several ways, for example in JSON-LD you may have:

  { "@context": {
      "lrmi"    : "http://purl.org/dcx/lrmi-terms/",
      "lrt"     : "http://purl.org/dcx/lrmi-vocabs/learningResourceType/",
      "dcterms" : "http://purl.org/dc/terms/",
      "lrmi:learningResourceType" : {
         "@type": "@id"
      }
    },
    "@type": "lrmi:LearningResouce",
    "@id": "http://example.edu/textbooks/0001",
    "dcterms:name": "Example Textbook",
     "lrmi:learningResourceType": "http://purl.org/dcx/lrmi-vocabs/learningResourceType/textbook"
  }

Or, if you don’t want to rely on consumers understanding/dereferencing that URI to get vital information, you may prefer:

{ "@context": {
    "lrmi" : "http://purl.org/dcx/lrmi-terms/",
    "lrt" : "http://purl.org/dcx/lrmi-vocabs/learningResourceType/",
    "dcterms" : "http://purl.org/dc/terms/",
    "skos" : "http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
  },
  "@type": "lrmi:LearningResouce",
  "@id": "http://example.edu/textbooks/0001",
  "dcterms:name": "Example Textbook",
  "lrmi:learningResourceType": {
    "@id": "http://purl.org/dcx/lrmi-vocabs/learningResourceType/textbook",
    "skos:prefLabel": "textbook"
  }
}

In schema.org, you may use the labels defined as simple string values, but you could include a link to our full definition (and hence provide access the links to other schemes that we define — after all this is linked data), by using a defined term as the value for learning resource type

{ "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@type": "LearningResouce",
  "@id": "http://example.edu/textbooks/0001",
  "name": "Example Textbook",
  "learningResourceType": {
    "@type": "DefinedTerm",
    "@id": "http://purl.org/dcx/lrmi-vocabs/learningResourceType/textbook",
    "name": "textbook"
  }
}