As my colleague Scott wrote recently, the European Standards body CEN has endorsed a “Workshop Agreement” on Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO) [final draft of MLO CWA], and made a commitment to develop a European standard (an EN) based on it. The CEN workshop agreement on MLO covers advertising of courses and other learning opportunities, e.g. sharing prospectus information and working with agencies like UCAS. Do read Scott’s post for more details.
The CWA is interesting in terms of general education metadata for a couple of reasons:
- it is an education-related metadata standard that uses some DC elements (more specifically some of the ISO 15836 “simple DC” element set — it’s not a profile of DC), and
- it models things like Learning Opportunity Specification, Provider and Instance, which may have some relationship to the objects relating to educational context and setting which have been identified as important in discussions relating to the Learning Material Application Profile and the DC-Ed Application Profile
Just in case you’re wondering, MLO is not related to ISO MLR or the LOM despite any similarity in the initials, they have a different scope.