DC-Education
Report of the DC-Education Working Group’s DC7 Sessions:
Tuesday, October 26 & Wednesday, October 27
Updated: 5 November 1999

REPORT BY: Jon Mason & Stuart Sutton (co-chairs)

ATTENDEES (one or both sessions):

• Thor Anderson (IMS) • Jon Mason (EdNA)
• Rei Atarashi (Nara Institute of Science & Technology) • Nancy Morgan (GEM)
• Allan Barclay • Liddy Nevile (Dept. Educ., Victoria, Australia)
• Alexander Bolte (Ferue Inst for Educational Research) • Ronan O’Beirne (Learning Direct Database Services)
• Alan Burk (Univ. of New Brunswick, SchoolNet, Canada) • Simon Pockley
• Erik Duval (K.U./ Ariadne / IEEE LTSC / ISSS LTWG) • Diann Rusch-Feja (DBS)
• Maria Elisabeth (SuB Gottingen) • Wolfrcam Sperber
• Ed Fox (Virginia Tech) • Achim Skinacker (KOM, TU Darmstadt)
• Jane Greenberg • Phillip Steven (Australian Business Information Service)
• Michel Klein (Vrye Univesiteit, CS, Amsterdam) • Stuart Sutton (GEM)
• Michael Kluck (Humboldt Univ., European SchoolNet) • Stuart Weibel (OCLC)
  • Mary Woodley

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26:

There were five items on DC-Education’s Frankfurt agenda:

  1. Relationships with other education and training metadata projects--IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) Learning Object Metadata (LOM) (e.g., the ARIADNE, GESTALT, & EDUCAUSE’s Instructional Management Systems (IMS))
  2. Review of work done to date
  3. Next face-to-face meeting
  4. Dublin Core element qualifiers
  5. Extension elements and qualifiers

Agenda Item #1: Relationships with other education and training metadata projects

Since the first agenda item presented a significant “threshold question,” the full meeting on Tuesday was spent discussing and arriving at a general consensus that in order to avoid unnecessary multiple metadata standards for network-based education and training materials, cooperation and coordination should be sought with IEEE and the projects under its umbrella. Prior to the Workshop, negotiations had been ongoing between DCMI and IMS on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and an Action Plan that defines matters regarding cooperation and the DC and IMS “name spaces”. At its meeting on Sunday, October 24, the Advisory Committee postponed action on the MOU pending clarification of the potentially divisive nature of the agreement— i.e., dividing US (IMS) and European (ARIADNE, GESTALT, etc.) projects under the IEEE umbrella. Agreement was reached to explore multi-way collaboration. [NOTE: During its closing meeting (same time as DC-Education’s second session), the Advisory Committee decided to table the IMS MOU and Action Plan while more expansive negotiations are pursued].

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27:

Agenda Item #2: Review of work done to date

Early participants on the DC-Education listserv asked for a summary of the elements (and their accompanying semantics) for existing metadata projects for education and training resources. The following non-definitive listing of projects were either mentioned on the list or otherwise identified:

An analysis was done of those projects marked with asterisks (*) in the listing above and a table containing elements, element qualifiers, and descriptions prepared in a common format before the meeting in Frankfurt (see http://www.iSchool.washington.edu/sasutton/DC-Education.html). In addition, a listing of elements held in common was developed. An admittedly crude metric for “commonality” was used: In order for an attribute to be considered “common,” it had to show up in two or more project element lists. A cursory examination of the entries in this listing of commonly held attributes revealed five general categories of resource attributes currently not expressible directly through unqualified DC (numbers in parenthesis indicate the number of projects including elements/qualifiers in the category):

  1. Users (6):
    • Grade, age, academic/vocational/training “level”
    • Administrators of the resource
    • Student “audience” (“target group,” “learning context,” “beneficiary”)
  2. Duration (3):
    • Focus on “use” time (as opposed to technical duration)
  3. Learning Processes/Characteristics:
    • Student groupings, teaching methods, mechanisms of assessment, learning prerequisites, interactivity type and level, material type from a didactic viewpoint, type of use in a scholastic milieu, “difficulty”, “semantic density,” etc.
  4. Standards (4):
    • National and/or international curricula
    • National and/or international content/process standards
    • Domain specific standards and benchmarks (e.g., U.S. Departments of Labor & Defense training benchmarks, etc.)
  5. Quality (3):
    • Unstructured assessments (e.g., third-party reviews/annotations)
    • Structured assessments (assessment based on established evaluative criteria)

In creating this listing of categories, the goal was to take a broad look at current DC-based project activity precisely focused on the domain of education and training. As a result, there were a number of factors that were not taken into consideration:

  1. Many of the projects use general DC element qualifiers (e.g., refinements of Identifier, Subject, etc.) that either duplicate many of the functions of qualifiers currently under consideration by the element WGs (as presented at DC7) or, are project specific (i.e., local) and have no direct relation to the general domain of education and training. For example, a number of the projects include substantial refinements to the Format element and/or otherwise include substantial technical metadata necessary to interoperability in their specific contexts. No such elements/qualifiers were considered.

  2. The DC distinction between “discovery” and “description” was not considered in the preliminary category analysis.

  3. The “fit” within the DC elements (with proposed new qualifiers) vs. new domain specific elements for education and training metadata discovered was not considered in the preliminary category analysis.

Agenda Item #3: Next face-to-face meeting

Plans for the face-to-face working meeting will be worked out over the course of the next few weeks over the DC-Education listserv. When the DC-Education Working Group was set up, tentative plans were for the Working Group to meet in Melbourne, Australia in December or January. Discussion and a decision regarding the meeting date and place must be one of the top priorities on the listserv discussions over the course of the next few weeks.

Agenda Item #4 & #5: Dublin Core elements and qualifiers & extension elements and qualifiers

It was thought that the general categories ferreted out of the six projects examined might provide an adequate, preliminary framework for both the DC-Education list discussions and the division of work over the next several months as we move toward our face-to-face meeting and our recommendations. It was decided that we would go back to the DC-Education list with this report and with the categories (with more clearly articulated category definitions) to find out who is interested in working on defining possible DC core element qualifiers and possible new education and training specific elements and qualifiers for each category.

It was observed that some of the categories are more “involved” and will take more time and effort than others (e.g., compare Duration and Learning Processes/Characteristics). It was thought that Learning Processes/Characteristics categories might be subdivided into more manageable parts. Such a subdivision will be part of the next-steps in the WG’s online deliberations.