An Educational CAD Model Library (CAD Library) is being developed by collaborating educational associations affiliated with the National Technology Leadership Summit coalition. The CAD Library's Curators' Council has developed descriptive metadata fields that will be associated with each educational object published in the library. These fields…

Linked Data principles and technologies are being investigated in various areas. In the Educational context, many studies are using Linked Data trying to solve problems of interoperability of educational data and resources, enriching educational content, and personalizing and recommending educational content and practices. This article presents a…

Reusable educational resources became increasingly important for enhancing learning and teaching experiences, particularly in the medical domain where resources are particularly expensive to produce. While interoperability across educational resources metadata repositories is yet limited to the heterogeneity of metadata standards and interface…

The paper describes the concept of a federated ecosystem for Open Educational Resources (OER) in the German education system. Here, a variety of OER repositories (ROER) (Muuß-Merholz & Schaumburg, 2014) and reference platforms have been established in the recent past. In order to develop this ecosystem, not only are metadata standards…

This paper presents a description of the metadata harvester software development. This system provides access to reliable and quality educational resources, shared by Mexican Universities through their repositories, to anyone with Internet Access. We present the conceptual and contextual framework, followed by the technical basis, the results and…

Students who search for broad terms on the Internet can be deluged by useless or offensive information. Dave Gladney, project manager for the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP), says what's needed is a commonly agreed-upon vocabulary for describing content for education search. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) has a…

This paper describes a knowledge-based strategy for recommending educational resources-worked problems, exercises, quiz questions, and lecture notes-to learners in the first two courses in the introductory sequence of a computer science major (CS1 and CS2). The goal of the recommendation strategy is to provide support for personalized access to…

Large-sized repositories of learning objects (LOs) are difficult to create and also to maintain. In this paper we propose a way to reduce this drawback by improving the classification mechanisms of the LO repositories. Specifically, we present a solution to automate the LO classification of the Universia repository, a collection of more than 15…

In the context of the emerging paradigm of Lifelong Learning, competence-based learning is gradually attracting the attention of the Technology-Enhanced Learning community, since it appears to meet the 21st Century learning and training expectations of both individuals and organisations. On the other hand, the paradigm of Learning Objects--as a…

The field of Social Research Methods is shared not only by the social sciences, but by many other disciplines. There is therefore enormous scope for the creation and re-use of open educational resources (OERs) in this area. However, our work with social scientists on a number of recent projects suggests that barriers exist to OER creation and use…

Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). A similar trend was observed about a decade ago in the concept of Learning Objects, which inevitably faded without really making an impact in real-world educational contexts. A number of repositories were created that contain thousands of learning…

Discusses reusable digital learning resources or objects in distance education and training. Focuses on the pivotal role of metadata and issues relating to classification, description, and meaning, specifically issues of semantics; and describes the CanCore Learning Object Metadata Application Profile. (Author/LRW)

Discusses the properties that distinguish learning object from other forms of educational software, including global accessibility, metadata standards, finer granularity and reusability, and their implications for evaluation. Proposes a convergent participation model for learning object evaluation and reviews other evaluation models that have been…

Explains the origin of the ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) commissioned papers that appear in this journal issue that assess the ERIC program. Discusses the need to unify the system by transforming the database into a knowledge base with a unified metadata framework that would include a variety of multimedia materials. (LRW)

Discusses the need for standardization for learning technologies in computer-based training systems. Highlights include institutions and organizations involved in standardization; a survey of educational metadata; how these data models are applied by actual software systems to facilitate the location of learning resources; and educational…