[Oer-community] OER Mapping

Fred M Beshears fredbeshears at gmail.com
Mon Nov 19 12:29:31 MST 2012


Phil, Peter, et. al.,

Thanks for the clarification. It sounds like LRMI does address higher ed.

Perhaps  the OER community would like to work with some spec or
standard setting group to develop metadata standards for institutions,
especially those that create OER. My guess is our current map
development exercise will lead to something like this.

FYI, at one point I was very much involved with specification/standard
setting; I was one of the co-chairs of the IMS technical board for a
couple of years (2005-2006) and I represented UC Berkeley form its
inception up to when I retired in 2007. Also, I attended many ISO/S36
and IEEE/LTSC meetings in those days. So, I'm familiar with the hand
off of the IMS metadata spec to IEEE/LTSC, which finally resulted in
the LOM standard.

But more to the point, I'm also familiar with what a hassle it is to
have multiple specification and standard setting groups, especially if
they are unwilling to cooperate. This could get really messy if we see
different standards groups forming to revise other kinds of
pre-existing specs (for a complete list of IMS specs, see
http://imsglobal.org/specifications.html)

I see that Colin Smythe from IMS Global is on the LMRI working group,
which I take as an indication that LMRI is coordinating with IMS in
some fashion. This is good.

However, I'm not entirely clear as to why LMRI decided to create yet
another learning object (educational resource) metadata group.  Their
website FAQ does include the following:

"How does LRMI relate to other education metadata initiatives?
LRMI aims to establish a common metadata schema to identify learning
resources that will complement learning standards, for example those
encoded in the Achievement Standards Network, including Common Core
State Standards for K12 (US), as well as all other online learning
vehicles. Interoperability is a key precept of LRMI. While simplicity
is necessary for mass adoption and search engine implementation,
mixing with and mapping to other vocabularies will be possible — for
example by mirroring the semantics of existing education metadata
vocabularies (e.g., Learning Object Metadata) to the extent possible,
so that explicit equivalences and refinements may be established,
protecting existing investments in educational metadata made by
publishers and curators of learning resources and by institutions to
date.  Additionally, LRMI will begin by examining lessons from
previous initiatives and real online descriptions of educational
resources, whether machine-readable or not. In this, we aim to utilize
the technology-agnostic aspects of the microformats process, described
at http://microformats.org/wiki/process."

This is certainly helpful, but it doesn't explicitly address the
question of why we need yet another specification setting and
standards setting group.

I can guess at a few reasons:

  a) some orgs don't want to or can't afford to pay IMS membership dues
      (I can certainly understand why this might be the case),

  b) some may not like the fact that IEEE sells its standards,
      which shouldn't be a problem since IMS was going to update
      it's publicly available spec to keep up with LOM (this was the
      case, at least, when I retired in 2007)

  c) some might want to make changes to the IEEE LOM such as
      providing a better way to specify the creative commons license that
      applies to a given resource. However, this too shouldn't be too much
      of a problem since the LOM could be updated and there are ways
      to create "profiles" of specs and standards (e..g CanCore's profile
      of the IMS metadata spec)

Of course, these reasons could be flat wrong and there could be other
reasons I haven't thought of.

So, it would be greatly appreciated if the folks working with LRMI
could enlighten the rest of us on this score so we don't have to
speculate.

Best,
Fred




On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 6:52 AM, Peter Pinch <pdpinch at mit.edu> wrote:
> We are launching a redesign of MIT OpenCourseWare in a few weeks, and the
> new site will have LRMI metadata.
>
>
> I have to agree with Phil that "special consideration was given to... use
> cases from US K-12 education," but I've still found enough of relevance in
> LRMI to apply it to MIT OCW. And I have more plans for after the redesign
> launches.
>
> Keep in mind, LRMI is collaborating with schema.org, a much larger effort
> to standardize semantic metadata on web pages. If you are publishing
> structured content on the web, schema.org deserves your attention. And
> LRMI is driving the conversation around educational objects in schema.org.
>
> -----------
> Peter Pinch
> Production Manager, MIT OpenCourseWare
> pdpinch at mit.edu
> http://ocw.mit.edu
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Phil Barker <phil.barker at hw.ac.uk>
> Reply-To: "lrmi at googlegroups.com" <lrmi at googlegroups.com>
> Date: Monday, November 19, 2012 5:16 AM
> To: "oer-community at athabascau.ca" <oer-community at athabascau.ca>,
> "lrmi at googlegroups.com" <lrmi at googlegroups.com>
> Subject: Re: [Oer-community] OER Mapping
>
>>
>>Hello Fred, I don't know if Greg managed to answer this, but I can give
>>an answer from the point of view of someone with a background in UK
>>Higher Education who is involved in the technical working group of LRMI.
>>
>>Simply put, no, LRMI is not just targeted at K-12. Yes, it will cover
>>higher ed and other non-US, non-school contexts, at least in part. Most
>>of the properties are neutral with respect to educational context. There
>>is some discussion on the LRMI list about its application to MIT's
>>OpenCourseWare. I think it is fair to say that special consideration was
>>given to addressing some high-priority use cases from US K-12 education
>>(alignment to common core curriculum standards), but not to the
>>exclusion of other contexts. I hope that the solution found for those
>>use cases will be transferable to similar use cases in other contexts.
>>For example, if a professional body mandates certain competencies before
>>providing an individual with accreditation to work (e.g. as a lawyer,
>>engineer or medic in the UK) then learning materials which align to
>>teaching or assessing those competencies can be marked up in the same
>>way as materials that align to some point in the common core curriculum.
>>Of course a lot of Higher Education doesn't work that way, and it was
>>probably this that Michael had in mind when answering the question.
>>
>>Phil
>>
>>[cross posting from OER-Community to LRMI lists in case anyone from LRMI
>>wants to contradict me]
>>
>>On 15/11/12 04:07, Fred M Beshears wrote:
>>> Hi Greg,
>>>
>>> I was watching the video with Michael Jay describing LRMI
>>> (http://www.lrmi.net), which is posted on the home page for the
>>> initiatve.
>>>
>>>   (BTW: I know Michael from my days at Berkeley's Instructional
>>> Technology Program.)
>>>
>>> During the Q&A he was asked if LRMI was for higher education and he
>>> said: "no, that they've looked at higher ed and there's a different
>>> set of search use cases in high ed." or words to that effect.
>>>
>>> So, is LRMI just targeted at K-12 or is it intended for higher ed as
>>>well?
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Fred M Beshears
>>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 6:20 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg at grossmeier.net>
>>>wrote:
>>>
>>
>>--
>>work: http://people.pjjk.net/phil
>>twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/philbarker
>>
>>Ubuntu: not so much an operating system as a learning opportunity.
>>http://xkcd.com/456/
>>
>
>
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