Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

December 2003 Volume 1 (6)

E-learning

Converging worlds

Dr Charles Duncan suggests libraries and e-learning are overlapping.

Question: When is a library not a library? Answer: When it is a digital repository of learning objects. Or is that still a library? Educators consider a digital repository as a collection of resources to be discovered and used in many different contexts. Is this different in any way from a library? Definitions of a library are not really helpful, what is really important are the skills needed to manage a digital repository of learning objects. Librarians have, in fact, been using these skills for years.

Over the last few years the worlds of e-learning and libraries have been converging; it is impossible to say where one stops and the other begins. Education has been moving away from CD-Roms, books and journals that cannot be easily disaggregated towards using small learning objects, editable documents where chapters or paragraphs can be extracted, and individual articles from e-journals. As the granularity of objects used in education has become smaller and smaller, from courses, to modules, to learning objects to individual media items, the number of objects has increased enormously. The job of managing this vast number of objects is daunting. At the same time libraries have expanded to add a vast array of digital media types to their collections.

These changes have made many educators aware of the word ‘metadata’ for the first time. Collections of learning objects are only useful if you can easily find what you are looking for. Every object must be systematically described. Libraries are where such expertise is found. So, is the answer to pass all the learning objects to librarians for cataloguing? No. There are at least four very good reasons why the challenge posed by learning objects needs to be seriously addressed by both the library and e-learning communities: scalability; identifiers; specialist metadata; the ‘learning object economy’.

Scalability: To picture the scale of the problem facing those who need to catalogue learning objects, consider a university course that might have one textbook and a reading list of another ten to twenty books. In e-learning terms that same course may have hundreds or even thousands of learning objects. Fast, accurate and efficient ways of creating metadata for each learning object are essential. More people are also needed for cataloguing.

Identifiers: Every one of the learning objects needs an identifier in the same way as books need ISBN numbers. But there are many more creators of learning objects than there are publishers of books. In a world where everyone concerned with education can become a publisher of learning objects it is still necessary to ensure that every learning object has a globally unique identifier.

Specialist metadata: It is difficult to describe learning objects using the metadata schemes that are common in libraries (MARC or Dublin Core) because there are many additional aspects to describe: aggregation level; technology requirements; interactivity type and level; educational context; intended end user; difficulty, learning time; educational objective; accessibility restrictions; competency; skill level. The IEEE has established a new international standard: the Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard. This is now being widely adopted by educators and an application profile, UK LOM Core, has been developed defining mandatory, recommended and option fields and vocabularies suitable for the UK education systems. The overriding difficulty is that completing this metadata really requires a combination of the educator’s skills for the education specific fields and a librarian’s skills for consistent cataloguing.

The learning object economy: The community of users of learning objects is also the community of creators of learning objects. Learning object repositories are a basis for sharing, for developing a ‘learning object economy’, usually based on exchange rather than cash. This means that learning objects come from a very wide range of sources. The situation is similar to a library where everyone is adding books to the shelves as well as borrowing them. This could quickly result in chaos. Suitable cataloguing is crucial to ensure that they are all discoverable. To add to the sense of a dynamic ‘economy’ the learning object metadata also supports annotations so that anyone who uses an object can comment on its use. This means that people can even search for learning objects based on who made comments on them.

While there are many challenges in handling learning objects in libraries the benefits are enormous. Reuse and sharing of learning objects not only reduces the time and effort in producing courses but it leads to improvements in quality. These benefits will increase further now that machine-to-machine searches and metadata harvesting are becoming common – a kind of automatic and instantaneous inter-library loan. These networks of digital repositories allow more exciting learning objects to be discovered, particularly through the ‘relations’ parts of the metadata. Imagine finding a useful video clip or diagram to include in a course. The relations part of the metadata associated with this object might list many modules or courses in which it is contained. So from the simplest level of media item it could be possible to find sophisticated courses containing this object. Aggregation of learning objects into more substantial learning objects and the management of digital rights when these objects come from many different sources raises many more interesting issues, but that is another story...

Dr Charles Duncan is CEO of a company developing e-learning products and formerly worked in online and distance learning at the University of Edinburgh.

Useful websites

IEEE Learning Object Metadata
ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/20020612-Final-LOM-Draft.html

CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards)
www.cetis.ac.uk/

CETIS Metadata and Digital Repositories Special Interests Group
metadata.cetis.ac.uk/

Quality Assurance for Digital Learning Object Repositories: How Should Metadata Be Created?
http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/files/currbartobeiryan_altj_6.doc (a dialogue box requesting a password may appear, simply cancel this to access the document)

JORUM: www.jorum.ac.uk/

Information Scotland Vol.1 (6) December 2003

Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.

Last updated: 16 February 2004