Category Archives: LRMI

What am I doing here? 4. Learning Resource Metadata

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The last of my January reviews of the main projects that I am working on is about Learning Resource Metadata, which is the theme that I have been working on for the longest. One of my first jobs in learning technology was maintaining and publishing a catalogue of computer-based resources that were useful for teaching Physics at university. That was back in 1994, and some of my work was still around when the Internet Archive started indexing. Since then I have been through several more online learning resource guides, and got involved in standards for learning resource metadata through the CETIS Metadata Special Interest Group, IEEE LOM / IMS Learning Resource Metadata, DCMI Education Community, and LRMI. LRMI is still going and that is what this blog post is about.

One of the most exciting recent developments has been that through the IEEE P2881 Learning Metadata Working Group LRMI—and more importantly the approach it embodies, as described below—is being incorporated in formal standards.

About the work

LRMI exists as an RDF vocabulary of terms (properties, classes and concept schemes) that can be used with terms from other vocabularies to describe learning resources. The LRMI vocabulary is declared as equivalent properties and classes in Dublin Core namespace and in Schema.org (mostly under Learning Resource). There are classes, properties and, in the Dublin Core namespace, concept schemes providing broad, top-level controlled vocabularies / value enumerations for some of the properties.

While we have done some technical work over the last year or so (notably creating a concept scheme for Learning Resource Type, and adding German translations to the published concept schemes) the main thrust of the current work is focused on promotion and dissemination. A major part of our effort currently underway is setting up to gather information about who is using LRMI, how they are using it, so that we can create documentation based on current real life examples.

Application Profiles are key to understanding how the LRMI vocabulary may be used. Application Profiles allow the “mixing and matching” of terms from different base vocabularies, and the overlay of additional rules or other information for how the terms are to be used in a specific application—see my previous posts on DCMI Tabular Application Profiles for more about how we do that. The LRMI terms focus on the educational aspects of any form of learning resource (text book, instructional video, web-based or face to face course, V/AR, podcast…), and are designed to supplement other vocabularies designed to describe any general resource of a similar form. So the idea is that you would select the terms from whatever vocabularies best describe the form that your learning resource takes, be it book, video, web site, event etc., and then use the LRMI properties to describe the educational characteristics.

This approach is at the root of that taken by the IEEE P2881 Working Group (described here). That work is not aiming to replace IEEE 1484.12.1 Standard for Learning Object Metadata (LOM), but to provide an RDF-based alternative for uses where the flexibility of RDF is beneficial. The current draft in progress is an application profile based mostly on LRMI terms (from the DCMI namespace) and Dublin Core Terms.

About my role

About twelve years ago I was mostly done with metadata. I was more interested in Open Education Resources (OERs) and how discoverability was supported by having the full text on open view. But then, along came schema.org.  Andy Powell asked what would it be necessary to add to the metadata understood by Google in order to adequately describe an OER. That approach was very much in line with the DCMI Education an UKOER metadata line of thinking, so I wrote a blog post in reply. Then, when the LRMI project got funding and was asking for input, I used that blog post to lever my way into the advisory group. And my involvement kind of grew from there. I now chair the Dublin Core LRMI Working Group, which is tasked with maintaining and advocating for the use of the LRMI vocabulary, and I represent the work in other fora, such as IEEE P2881.

Harmonizing Learning Resource Metadata (even LOM)

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The best interoperability is interoperability between standards. I mean it’s one thing for you and I to agree to use the same standard in the same way to do the same thing, but what if we are doing slightly different things? What if Dublin Core is right for you, but schema.org is right for me–does that mean we can’t exchange data? That would be a shame, as one standard to rule them all isn’t a viable solution. This has been exercising me through a couple of projects that I have worked on recently, and what I’ll show here is demo based on the ideas from one of these (The T3 Data Ecosystem Mapping Project) applied to another where learning resource metadata is available in many formats and desired in others. In this post I focus on metadata available as IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) but wanted in either schema.org or DCAT.

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LRMI™ as a Starting Point for IEEE P2881 Standard for Learning Metadata

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IEEE are standing up a working group for Learning Metadata, to build on IEEE Std 1484.12.1 Standard for Learning Object Metadata while exploring new paradigms and technology practices in education. I submitted the following as a suggestion for a starting point. It’s heavily based on the presentaion I did at the start of the LRMI Metadata in Use panel session for DCMI Virtual. I think it is a reasonable introduction to, and reflection on the strengths of LRMI (we can do the weaknesses some other day). Many thanks to colleagues in the DCMI LRMI Task Group who commented on it, and especially Staurt Sutton for the 10 principles enumerated at the end.

The text below is also available as a PDF, and you can run through the slides I used to present it.

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Mapping learning resources to curricula in RDF

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Some personal reflections on relating educational content to curriculum frameworks prompted by some conversation about the Oak National Academy (a broad curriculum of online material available to schools, based on the English national curriculum), and OEH-Linked-Frameworks (an RDF tool for visualizing German educational frameworks). It draws heavily on the BBC curriculum ontology (by Zoe Rose, I think). I’m thinking about these with respect to work I have been involved in such as K12-OCX and LRMI.

If you want to know why you would do this, you might want to skip ahead and read the “so what?” section first. But in brief: representing curriculum frameworks in a standard, machine-readable way, and mapping curriculum materials to that, would help when sharing learning resources.

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LearningResource added to schema.org

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A new type was added to the ‘pending’ terms in schema.org in the July release (release 9.0), LearningResource. It sits in the type hierarchy as a subtype of CreativeWork, and the definition and notes read:

The LearningResource type can be used to indicate CreativeWorks (whether physical or digital) that have a particular and explicit orientation towards learning, education, skill acquisition, and other educational purposes.

LearningResource is expected to be used as an addition to a primary type such as Book, Video, Product etc.

EducationEvent serves a similar purpose for event-like things (e.g. a Trip). A LearningResource may be created as a result of an EducationEvent, for example by recording one.

The properties in the domain of LearningResource are those that come from LRMI, nameley:  assesses, educationalAlignment, educationalLevel, educationalUse, and teaches. [Oops, learningResourceType is missing]

Although listed as pending, people using schema.org to describe educational resources are encouraged to use the term and report any issues. The only way terms can move from pending to the core of schema.org is if there is sufficient evidence of use.

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New properties for learning resources in schema.org

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I am somewhat late in writing this, but back in May some new properties developed by LRMI were added to schema.org that simplify and expand how schema.org can be used to describe learning resources and educational events.

The new properties are:

teaches: The item being described is intended to help a person learn the competency or learning outcome defined by the referenced term.

assesses: The item being described is intended to assess the competency or learning outcome defined by the referenced term.

These are added as properties of CreativeWork and EducationEvent, and can both be used with either a DefinedTerm or text as the value (or URL, which is an allowed value for any schema.org property).

In a related change, the domain of educationalLevel, (“the level in terms of progression through an educational or training context”), which was added last year for EducationalOccupationalCredentials was expanded so that it can also be used with CreativeWork and EducationEvent. It also can have DefinedTerms, text or URL as a value.

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Translating course descriptions from XCRI-CAP to schema.org

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XCRI-CAP (eXchanging Course Related Information, Course Advertising Profile) is the UK standard for course marketing information in Higher Education. It is compatible with the European Standard Metadata for Learning Opportunities. The W3C schema course extension community group has developed terms for describing educational courses that are now part of schema.org. Here I look at translating the data from an XCRI-CAP xml feed to schema.org json-ld. Continue reading →

New publication analysing LRMI metadata on the web

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I have a new publication: “Analysing and Improving Embedded Markup of Learning Resources on the Web,” which Stefan Dietze and Davide Taibi have presented at the 2017 International World Wide Web Conference in Perth Australia. I played a minor role in the “analysing” part of this work, the heavy lifting was done by my co-authors. They analysed data from the Common Crawl to identify sites that were using LRMI terms in their schema.org markup.  The analysis provides answers to important questions such as: who is using LRMI metadata and which terms are they using? How many resources have been marked up with LRMI metadata? Are the numbers of users growing? What mistakes are being made in implementing LRMI? Continue reading →