Tag 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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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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K12 Open Content Exchange

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I’ve been intending to write about the K12 Open Content Exchange project, and its metadata, but for various reasons haven’t got round to it. As I have just submitted a use case to the DCMI Application Profile Interest Group based on the projects requirements I’ll post that.

The project is being run by Learning Tapestry in the US, I am contracted to build the metadata specification in an iterative fashion based on experiences of content exchange between the partners (currently we are at iteration 1). I want to stress that this isn’t an authoritative description of all the project’s intents and purposes, or even all the metadata requirements, it’s a use case based on them, but I hope it gives a flavour of the work. The requirements section is more relevant if you’re interested in how to specify application profiles than for the OCX spec per se. Continue reading →

Metadata for markdown / MkDocs

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I’ve been experimenting with ways of putting JSON-LD schema.org metadata into HTML created by MkDocs. The result is a python-markdown plugin that will (hopefully) find blocks of YAML in markdown and insert then into the HTML that is generated. You can find the plugin on github, and you can read more about the development of it in some pages generated by MkDocs  (that incidentally use the plugin).

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Progress report for Educational and Occupational Credentials in schema.org

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[This is cross-posted from the Educational and Occupational Credentials in schema.org W3C community group, if you interested please direct your comments there.]

Over the past few months we have been working systematically through the 30-or-so outline use cases for describing Educational and Occupational Credentials in schema.org, suggesting how they can be met with existing schema.org terms, or failing that working on proposals for new terms to add. Here I want to summarize the progress against these use cases, inviting review of our solutions and closure of any outstanding issues. Continue reading →

Educational and occupational credentials in schema.org

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Since the summer I have been working with the Credential Engine, which is based at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, on a project to facilitate the description of educational and occupational credentials in schema.org. We have just reached the milestone of setting up a W3C Community Group to carry out that work.  If you would like to contribute to the work of the group (or even just lurk and follow what we do) please join it. Continue reading →