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Lorna M Campbell

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LRMI Implementation Case Study: P2PU

Posted on August 29, 2014 by admin

Team leader: Dirk Uys

p2pu_logo“P2PU is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. Learning for the people, by the people. About almost anything.”

http://info.p2pu.org/


P2PU’s main focus is on community; by providing content creation tools, users are enabled to create open online courses. Tools include the Mechanical MOOC, which enables users to create large open online courses on a “shoestring budget”; course creation tools, which bring together groups of peer learners; and badging tools which enable learners to create and award badges. P2PU courses are primarily aimed at continuing education and all are openly licensed under the CC BY SA licence.

p2pu_courses

P2PU Courses

All the tools developed by P2PU are open source and hosted on GitHub.  The tool under discussion is  Lernanta, which started as a fork of Mozilla drumbeat’s Batucada project.

Metadata is added to courses as they are created by users.  All courses have basic LRMI metadata; title, author, description and language. Course creators also have the option to add additional metadata. The amount of metadata recorded for any given course is dependant on the course creator.  Some fields are populated automatically from internal data, e.g. it is implicit that the ‘author’ is the creator of the course.  All metadata is held in a MySQL database.  P2PU does not use any metadata other than LRMI and Schema.org.  The code for P2PU’s LRMI app which enables users to enter additional metadata is available on GitHub: lernanta / lernanta / apps / lrmi /

P2PU has implemented all LRMI properties, but most are optional.

Mandatory:

  • learningResourceType – course
  • useRightsUrl – CC BY SA

Optional:

  • educationalAlignment
  • educationalUse
  • timeRequired
  • typicalAgeRange
  • interactivityType
  • isBasedonUrl
  • educationalRole

educationalAlignment is an optional property, but it is infrequently used as there are few appropriate vocabularies to align to.  The only properties P2PU provides vocabularies for are educationalRole and interactivityType.

p2pu_lrmiExample of P2PU LRMI markup

The following schema.org properties have also been implemented:

  • name
  • url
  • image
  • description
  • about
  • dateCreated
  • author
  • inLanguage

Going forward, P2PU plan to encourage people to self publish their own courses in their own places, and are working on a Jekyll course template for running open online courses: jekyll-course-template.  The intention is that these self published courses should still carry LRMI metadata.  LRMI could also potentially be used to index these courses.  P2PU are also interested in implementing LRMI for badges, but have not taken this forward yet.

Posted in cetis, lrmi, oer | Tagged lrmi, lrmi implementation, metadata, oer, open, p2pu | 1 Comment

LRMI Implementation Case Study: PhET Interactive Simulations

Posted on August 22, 2014 by admin

Project Team – Kathy Perkins, Director and Jonathan B Olson, Software Engineer

“PhET provides fun, interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena for free. We believe that our research-based approach- incorporating findings from prior research and our own testing- enables students to make connections between real-life phenomena and the underlying science, deepening their understanding and appreciation of the physical world.”

http://phet.colorado.edu/

phet

PhET resource page

The PhET LRMI implementation project ran from July 2012 – July 2013.  PhET currently has 128 simulations which are used over 45 million times per year.  Since the site has 36 current website translations, unique metadata is provided on 4608 pages (each translated page has LRMI metadata in that language). The simulations are aimed primarily at K-12 and college use, but are designed to be compatible with any type of education. All simulations are licensed under the GPL, and most are also licensed CC BY.

LRMI is integrated into PhET metadata, so it is detectable by third parties that crawl or search the website. The site also provides Dublin Core, NSDL Dublin Core, IEEE LOM, IMS LODE ILOX, and a custom super-set of this metadata available via OAI-PMH and a REST API. Additionally, various custom exports have been created, usually CSV-based and customized to a particular portal.  Metadata is stored in the PhET website’s main database and metadata for third-parties is automatically generated from the database, on demand, in a variety of formats.  Since metadata is provided only for simulations, PhET does not store many of the LRMI properties internally in the DB since they are the same for every simulation. However the mapping includes translations (viewing a page on the Korean translation of the website will include Korean terms in the metadata).

PhET has implented the following LRMI properties and types:

  • educationalAlignment: yes, includes multiple standards alignments
  • educationalUse: yes, “classroom”, “homework” and “solution” for simulations
  • interactivityType: yes, “active”
  • learningResourceType: yes, “simulation”
  • useRightsUrl: yes, can include multiple URLs (many simulations are dual-licensed)

PhET has not implemented:

  • timeRequired: no (for inquiry-based simulations, there is no “standard” time required)
  • typicalAgeRange: not yet, had previous uncertainty about format
  • isBasedonUrl: no, simulations are original works

Currently “educationalAlignment” aligns to the Math Common Core, but the project team is currently working with teachers to create an NGSS alignment, which can be added.

PhET also implements the Schema.org “SoftwareApplication” type which enables them to provide available language information, denote PhET as the publishing and authoring organization, provide thumbnail and screenshot image URLs, denote it as applicationCategory:Educational, provide the “run now” and “download” URLs (url and downloadUrl), the download filesize, version/softwareVersion, description (in the language provided), a list of keywords, and dates created / modified.

phet_code

PhET markup sample

During the funded phase of their LRMI implementation project, PhET initially shared their metadata with the Learning Registry, but as the Learning Registry has changed their protocols so frequently the project team has not been able to keep up with their change requests. PhET is currently not listed as Learning Registry contributors, but the team hopes that they will be able start sharing their metadata again once the protocols have settled down.

PhET has no current plans to develop their LRMI implementation further, unless there is additional demand from other organizations.  The project team is unsure of how to measure the direct benefits of LRMI implementation but they are pleased that their simulations include LRMI metadata. Other third-party projects have also been pleased that PhET make LRMI metadata available and have pulled that data into their own applications.

Posted in cetis, lrmi, oer | Tagged cetis, lrmi, lrmi implementation, metadata, oer | Leave a comment

LRMI Implementation Case Study: MERLOT

Posted on August 15, 2014 by admin

Team leader: Barbra Bied Sperling, Manager of Technical Development.

“MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages, together with associated comments, and personal collections, all intended to enhance the teaching and learning experience.”

http://www.merlot.org/

MERLOT is a metadata repository containing records for 46,000 open educational resources covering a wide range of subjects and all levels of education. Users are able to comment on and aggregate resources to create personal collections. MERLOT resources are peer reviewed by members and each resource record includes a “Quality Tile”, which presents information on peer reviews, user ratings, comments and collections the resource has been added to.

merlot_page

Example of a MERLOT resource page

MERLOT also provides access to a wide range of additional facilities including APIs to integrate with learning management systems and other applications, mobile search apps for iOS, Android and Blackberry, a content builder for creating hosted online learning materials and various community building tools such as discipline communities, community discussions, and social networking facilities.

MERLOT uses Spring Framework as well as a number of Apache Commons java libraries and is served from CentOS (Linux) using Apache and Tomcat. Eclipse IDE, Vim and Notepad++ are used for editing, and Mozilla Firefox for testing. MERLOT applications are not open source.

MERLOT has developed a proprietary metadata schema, which covers a range of common fields including title, URL, description, material type, primary audience, language, keywords, subject category / disciplines, author information, technical format, technical requirements, mobile platforms, license, cost and accessibility.  Fields are stored in Oracle database tables. Metadata is created by users when a resource is added to MERLOT, and it is rarely modified beyond this point, other than to verify that all links still work.  MERLOT does not share metadata with the Learning Registry, and  MERLOT metadata records are not Creative Commons licensed.

A mapping (.xls) has been created between the proprietary MERLOT metadata schema and LRMI to enable the appropriate microtags to be added to resource description pages within MERLOT.

Merlot uses the following LRMI properties:

  • educationAlignment
  • useRightsUrl

Plus additional Schema.org properties:

  • creativeWork,
  • headline,
  • rating,
  • aggregateRating,
  • offer

The alignmentType of educationAlignment is educationalSubject, which maps to a proprietary vocabulary.

merlot_code

Sample of MERLOT LRMI markup

Since implementing LRMI MERLOT has not observed any measurable impact, although it is possible that the presence of LRMI and schema.org metadata on MERLOT’s resource description pages increases the discoverability of resources.

Links

MERLOT
MERLOT / LRMI mapping (.xls)

Posted in cetis, lrmi, oer | Tagged cetis, lrmi, lrmi implementation, metadata, oer | 1 Comment

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Gooru

Posted on August 14, 2014 by admin

Project lead: Lisa McLaughlin,  Senior Director of Partnerships

“Gooru’s mission is to honor the human right to education. We are dedicated to engaging a community of teachers, developers, and supporters to unleash personalized learning with technology to educate all the students of the world.”

http://www.goorulearning.org/

Gooru serves as a personalized learning platform, incorporating a custom search engine, playlist creation tool, and content aggregator.  The system allows users to find standards-aligned, interactive learning materials that have been curated by teachers; share those materials in the form of custom collections, personalized to meet the needs of individual students; and measure students’ progress across collections and quizzes assigned to them.  Users can search over 2 million CC licensed learning resources, browse through collections, lessons and individual resources and filter search results by grade level, resource type, and Common Core State Standard.

Gooru resource search

Gooru resource search

Gooru is a repository of playlists, rather than a repository of content.  There are currently 18 million resources in the Gooru catalog; 180,000 of these are tagged to instructional standards such as the Common Core State Standards and 50,000 are collections created by teachers and students. Users can also build assessment features into their playlists and the system includes an assessment bank of 1.5 million items. Gooru resources carry a variety of different licences but all are open and free to use. Playlists are currently shared under a CC BY SA licence, however Gooru are in the process of transitioning to CC0 over the course of the next month.  Most content is aimed at the K-12 sector.

Gooru collection search showing CCSS classification

Gooru collection search showing CCSS classification

Gooru has developed an open source learning architecture licensed under the MIT Open Source Initiative approved licence, and a number of APIs that enable developers to build applications based on the Gooru infrastructure. The Gooru APIs are available here: Gooru APIs, and further information about the Gooru development community is available here Gooru Learning Developers.

A custom Gooru Metadata Schema (GMS) composed of 40 fields has been created from various metadata schemas. The Gooru Metadata Schema may be regarded as a variant of the LOM, though to date, GMS has not been mapped directly to LOM. Accessibility Metadata Project fields are used to describe the accessibility of content.

Content with high quality metadata is weighted more heavily in search results, though other factors also come into play, such as how many times a resource is included in other playlists.

Gooru does not ingest metadata through OAI PMH; some metadata is generated by users uploading resources and tagging them using the GMS, but the majority comes from web crawling. Domains are curated through a range of input, both internal and through Gooru’s wider network of partners, before pursuing crawls. Teacher-added domains are prioritized.  Basic metadata including title, author, publisher, description, etc is captured from each domain, and then passed to a QA cleaning team, who manually identify more nuanced characteristics, e.g. educational use, time required, etc. For subjective fields, such as educational use, a script has been created for cleaning the metadata. The QA team is currently focused on cleaning the metadata on all OER collections and Gooru recently launched an OER filter.

Metadata fields are currently stored in an SQL database, however Gooru will move to a no-SQL framework later in 2014.  Paradata is also  stored in similar SQL tables but is returned by different APIs. Only some of the Gooru paradata is currently exposed.

Components of LRMI have been incorporated into the Gooru Metadata Schema and a mapping can be provided from the GMS to LRMI.  Approximately 95% of the Gooru catalog is now tagged with LRMI.

The following LRMI properties and types have been implemented and the Gooru LRMI Metadata schema is available here (.xls).

  • educationalAlignment
  • educationalUse
  • timeRequired
  • typicalAgeRange
  • interactivityType
  • learningResourceType
  • useRightsUrl
  • isBasedonUrl

The GMS includes an Educational Alignment field with alignment types ‘subject’ and ‘educational level’.  Alignment type ‘text complexity’ may be added in the future.

In addition to Common Core State Standards, Gooru content is also aligned to  Texas Curriculum Standards and California Science Standards

Links

Gooru
Gooru Metadata Guide
Gooru LRMI Metadata Schema

Posted in cetis, lrmi, oer | Tagged cetis, lrmi implementation, metadata, oer | Leave a comment

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Jorum

Posted on August 7, 2014 by admin

Project lead – Ben Ryan, Jorum Technical Coordinator.

“Jorum is a Jisc funded Service for UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share open educational resources, allowing their reuse and repurposing. Jorum’s free online repository service forms a key part of Jisc’s Learning and Teaching digital content offering. It is the first port of call for thousands of resources, all shared and created by those who teach or have been inspired in the FE and HE and professional skills community.”

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

The Jorum LRMI implementation project began in September 2013 and work is ongoing as the platform develops. Jorum is a DSpace repository containing a wide range of educational resources in many different formats, including a considerable volume of IMS Content Packages. The repository contains approximately 16,000+ resources, most of which are openly licensed. Jorum uses a combination of LOM, DC, LRMI, Jorum metadata, plus custom fields for different collection ‘windows’. LRMI properties are crosswalked to LOM education fields.

jorum_search_results

Jorum search returns page

Implementing LRMI in Jorum presented something of a challenge to the project team as DSpace only allows metadata to be added to ‘items’ which are collections of individual files.  Metadata can not be applied at the file level, e.g. an html page within a content package, and there is no way to add microdata to an individual page. If Jorum ingests a resource that already includes LRMI it can be cross walked to map to the LOM fields, however if a content package contains multiple pages that are marked up with LRMI it is difficult to extract this data as there is nowhere to store it in DSpace.  In addition, in order to enable a search engine to access a full set of LRMI metadata it is necessary to generate a page containing the LRMI which the search engine can hit. The default page generated by DSpace only includes title, author and description. To generate a page with a richer set of metadata it is necessary to create a custom theme, which is a non trivial task.

jorum_record_2

Jorum resource page

Despite the technical difficulty of implementing LRMI in DSpace, the Jorum project has made good progress and the team have plans for further development in this area including implementing the new Schema.org License property, implementing the alignmentObject and aligning it to the UK higher education Joint Academic Subject Coding Scheme.  The project team also plan to build a Google Custom Search engine to demonstrate how Jorum LRMI metadata can be surfaced.

Jorum has implemented the following LRMI properties and types, though this is dependent on what metadata has been supplied for each resource.

  • educationalAlignment: plan to implement in the future
  • educationalUse: yes,
  • timeRequired: yes
  • typicalAgeRange: no
  • interactivityType: yes
  • learningResourceType: yes
  • useRightsUrl: no, but plan to implement License property

The Jorum project team have not yet shared their LRMI metadata with the Learning Registry as they are waiting to upgrade their platform to DSpace 4.0 before taking this implementation forward as DSpace 4.0 includes an upgraded OAI PMH interface providing a good flexible way to generate metadata from different schema.  It should be noted that Jorum have already undertaken a successful Learning Registry implementation project, the Jisc funded JLeRN Experiment ( which successfully built a Learning Registry node in the UK and developed a number of prototype services for LR ingest and querying. The same developer responsible for the JLeRN implementation has been commissioned to undertake the Jorum LRMI implementation and this work will be taken forward once the upgrade to DSpace 4.0 is complete.

Links

Jorum
Jorum Case Study Questionnaire
Jorum Blog: Implementing the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) in Jorum

Posted in cetis, higher education, lrmi, oer | Tagged cetis, discoverability, higher education, jorum, lrmi, lrmi implementation, metadata, oer | Leave a comment

LRMI Implementation Case Study: Open Tapestry

Posted on August 6, 2014 by admin

Project team: Justin Ball, CTO;  Joel Duffin, CEO

“Open Tapestry is all about discovering, adapting, and sharing learning resources, whether you’re a teacher, an instructor, a professor, a corporate trainer, a learner, or just a curious mind! We help you organize your content into categories–or Tapestries–that you create. Open Tapestry’s toolset allows instructors to develop course materials in a fraction of the time, while invigorating and enhancing learners’ experience. We give you the tools to mold and shape content already on the web to exactly how you want it.”

http://www.opentapestry.com/

open_tapestryOpen Tapestry provides tools to enable users to author resources and create and share modules, or tapestries, from existing content.  The system also has some repository-like  aspects in that it searches open content repositories, harvests metadata and enables users to upload resources. Open Tapestry pulls in all types of resources at different levels of granularity. There are currently around a million resources, mostly aimed at higher education, however Open Tapestry has also worked with online high schools and a few primary grades.  While Open Tapestry encourages use of open content, but users are also able to create closed instances for their own organisations.

Open Tapestry is a custom platform built on Ruby on Rails.  The platform uses a number of open source libraries and about ten APIs, but is not currently open source itself. The code used to detect and parse open licences is based on Open Attribute, and Gem is used to interact with Canvas.

Open Tapestry supports IMS LTI to facilitate learning management system integration.  This allows users to manage content outside the LMS and then present it inside the system.

Open Tapestry harvests metadata using OAI PMH, web crawlers and RSS harvesters.  The application tries to be as inclusive as possible; any format of metadata that is found, e.g. Dublin Core, LOM, LRMI,  will be parsed and stored internally. This internal metadata can then be transformed into any number of other formats.  The system also facilitates some cross walking.  All harvested metadata is retained and users are able to add to that metadata.  A small number of vocabularies are built into the system, e.g. licence.

The metadata that exists for any given resource depends on what has been harvested, or created by users, however if a page has no metadata, Open Tapestry will produce basic fields used for indexing and searching.  Open Tapestry has two main levels of content granularity;  resources and collections (tapestries) and metadata is applied at both of these levels. Collections can be combined from multiple sources and metadata is provided for each source.

Open Tapestry has fields for all LRMI elements but to date, users have tended not to fill them in.

  • educationalAlignment
  • educationalUse
  • timeRequired
  • typicalAgeRange
  • interactivityType
  • learningResourceType
  • useRightsUrl
  • isBasedonUrl

One way to encourage greater adoption of LRMI suggested by Open Tapestry is to focus on providing targeted search for a particular audience or usecase e.g. learning management systems.  LMS are currently grappling with how to integrate openly licensed resources with closed content and LRMI could potentially provide a solution to this problem.

Open Tapestry does not share metadata records with the Learning Registry as the system is primarily a metadata aggregator, very few new metadata record are produced by Open Tapestry.

One significant issue surfaced by Open Tapestry is how to track metadata assertions as resources, and metadata records are edited and aggregated.  This is particularly important for derivative works, where it is necessary to keep track of entire genealogies of who is making the assertions recorded in the metadata.  While cataloguers are aware of the necessity of creating and maintaining high quality metadata, content creators often have low awareness of the importance of metadata until they have a problem, e.g. concerns about who carries liability for a resource or assertion. Technical solutions are required to address this problem.

Links:

Open Tapestry
Open Tapestry Case Study Questionnaire

Posted in cetis, lrmi, oer | Tagged cetis, lrmi, lrmi implementation, metadata, oer | Leave a comment

LRMI Implementation Projects Case Studies

Posted on August 6, 2014 by admin

As part of our work for Creative Commons on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), my colleague Phil Barker and I have been writing short case studies on a number of LRMI implementation projects that were funded between 2013 – 2014. Ten different OER platforms received small grants from the Gates and Hewlett Foundations to implement the LRMI specification and share their experiences with other developers. I’ll be posting the case studies here over the next couple of weeks and once all case studies have been completed we also plan to produce a high level technical synthesis of the projects’ outputs.

An early overview of some of the implementation projects was presented at the Cetis 2014 Conference at the University of Bolton in June.

LRMI Implementation Projects

Connexions / OpenStax CNX

Connexions, now OpenStax CNX, was launched in 1999 at Rice University to provide authors and learners with an open space where they can share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. Today, OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes. Tens of thousands of learning objects called pages, are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.

Curriki

Curriki provides peer reviewed open educational resources, curricula and instructional materials to support teachers, professional educators, students, lifelong learners, and parents, primarily in the domain of K-12 education. Curriki is a nonprofit organization and the majority of the resources is provides carry Creative Commons licences.

GooruLearning

GooruLearning an open and collaborative online learning community. Gooru enables teachers and students to find standards-aligned, interactive learning materials that have been rated by fellow teachers, share those materials in the form of personalized custom collections, measure students’ engagement, comprehension, and progress, and contribute to an active community of teachers and students by sharing your collections and best practices.

ISKME

ISKME is an independent, education non-profit company whose mission is to improve the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector. ISKME supports innovative teaching and learning practices throughout the globe, and is well-known for its pioneering open education initiatives. ISKME also assists policy makers, foundations, and education institutions in designing, assessing, and bringing continuous improvement to education policies, programs, and practice.

Jorum

Jorum is a Jisc funded Service for UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share open educational resources, allowing their reuse and repurposing. Jorum’s free online repository service forms a key part of Jisc’s Learning and Teaching digital content offering. It is the first port of call for 1000’s of resources, all shared and created by those who teach or have been inspired in the FE and HE and professional skills community.

MERLOT

MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages, together with associated comments, and personal collections, all intended to enhance the teaching and learning experience.

Open Tapestry

Open Tapestry is a toolkit that enables teachers, instructors, professors, corporate trainers, students and learners to discover, adapt, and share learning resources. The Open Tapestry toolkit allows instructors to develop course materials and organise content into categories, or Tapestries, to enhance learners’ experiences.

Peer2Peer University

Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities.

Untrikiwiki

UntrikiWiki were funded to develop a MediaWiki extension to allow the use of schema.org markup in Wikitext. As part of this project, UntrikiWiki advocated the use of open-source extension HTML Tags on wikis.

Posted in cetis, lrmi, oer | Tagged cetis, cetis14, lrmi, lrmi implementation, metadata, oer | Leave a comment

Creative Commons engage Cetis to co-lead the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Posted on March 18, 2014 by admin

(Originally posted at http://www.cetis.ac.uk/)

lrmi_404pxWe are delighted to announce that Cetis has been commissioned by Creative Commons to help manage the third phase of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI). The project, which builds on the work of Schema.org, aims to support the discovery of relevant education resources on the web. LRMI is co-led by Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP)—now the 501(c)(3) arm of the Association of American Publishers—so Phil Barker and Lorna Campbell will be working closely with representatives of both Creative Commons and AEP to support the uptake and implementation of LRMI and raise awareness of its benefits.

Phil has been involved in the LRMI Technical Working Group since its inception in Summer 2011; he and Lorna bring to the initiative over 20 years of combined experience in the creation and implementation of metadata specifications for educational resources. Their work for this phase of LRMI will focus on the governance and long term sustainability of the specification; nurturing an active and engaged technical working group; raising awareness of the benefits and business case for the use of LRMI metadata; providing support and advice for developers and implementers; and synthesising and disseminating the output and lessons learned from existing LRMI implementations.

Paul Hollins, Cetis co-director said:

“Cetis is very pleased to be leading this work with Creative Commons. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative is an important development in making resources more discoverable and so will benefit teachers and learners globally. I am sure that the expertise of Cetis staff in specification development and metadata will greatly contribute to the success of the project.”

Cable Green, Director of Global Learning, Creative Commons, said:

“Creative Commons is thrilled Lorna and Phil have formally joined the LRMI project. Their combined expertise in meta-data and open educational resources is the perfect combination as we create toolkits, roll out the specification and find a long-term steward for LRMI.”

Dave Gladney, Director of Communications Technology/LRMI Project Manager, PreK-12 Learning Group, Association of American Publishers, said:

“The LRMI will benefit greatly from Phil and Lorna’s technical expertise and strong background in the education metadata space. We’re very excited to be working alongside Cetis and Creative Commons to move the project forward.”

About LRMI

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and jointly lead by Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers—now the 501(c)(3) arm of the Association of American Publishers—with the aim of making it easier to publish, discover, and deliver high quality educational resources on the web. With input from a wide range of organisations, from both the open and commercial spheres, involved in publishing and using educational resource LRMI successfully proposed additions to schema.org (an initiative of Google, Yahoo and Bing) allowing the description of educationally important properties of resources to be marked-up in web pages in a manner that is easily understood by search engines. This enables people to create search engines that support the filtering search results based on criteria such as their match to a specific part of a curriculum, or the age of the students, or one of several other characteristics.

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. They are best known for their free, easy-to-use copyright licenses that provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use a creative work subject to a choice of conditions. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” Creative Commons builds infrastructure. Their users build the commons itself. Creative Commons are working to increase the adoption of their tools, to support and listen to our users, and to serve as a trusted steward of interoperable commons infrastructure.

About Cetis

Cetis is the Centre for Educational Technology, Interoperability and Standards. Cetis staff are globally recognised as leading experts on education technology innovation, interoperability and technology standards. For over a decade Cetis has provided strategic, technical and pedagogical advice on educational technology and standards to funding bodies, standards agencies, government, institutions and commercial partners. Cetis is based at the University of Bolton in partnership with Heriot-Watt University.

Posted in cetis, lrmi, standards | Tagged cetis, creative commons, lrmi, metadata, standards | Leave a comment

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