Instructional Management System: Metadata Standards
Sponsor EDUCOM, a national consortium of 600 colleges and universities dedicated to transforming education through information technology...
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Sponsor: EDUCOM, a national consortium of 600 colleges and universities dedicated to transforming education through information technology.
From the IMS Project information booklets:
The Internet and the Web offer educational institutions and commercial organizations a common foundation for developing and integrating software tools into distributed learning environments. What is still needed, however, is a set of higher-order, Internet-based specifications that form a framework withinwhich individual software objects or modules can be integrated.The IMS specifications will support cross-platform organization, retrieval, and management of Web-based instructional materials (and encourage) modules to interoperate with such activities as tracking student progress, *automated incorporation of modules in broader frameworks, collaborative interaction, and navigation among modules. They will support a broad range of learning models from behaviorist to constructivist.
...Effective distribution mechanisms will protect intellectual property rights...By permitting teachers and learners to seamlessly integrate instructional materials from a wide range of sources, the IMS will promoted a range of learning environments,...tailored to the needs of individual students. (end)
Instructional resources, in other words, have exploded so rapidly and randomly that anarchy reigns. The end result of this project will make coordination efficient and meaningful.
The Gateway, advocated by ERIC, (GEM) is another set of metadata specifications and just produced a testbed for trial use. As of Fallo 2002 over 25,000 records have been amassed by GEM.
Tell your colleagues, especially technology and media specialists, so that your own preparation of Web resources will be compatible with these specifications and, thereby, appear via search mechanisms.
Annotation
Telecommunications is a powerful enhancer to learning; without higher-order structures to bring organization out of chaos teachers can quickly become discouraged when preparing their own projects for students.Moreover, many of the resources available via telecommunications, do not fit into the Dewey system except by subject matter, a bewildering array of sub-topics. Such systems do not allow for degree of interactivity, for instance--one of the new specifications fields.
At the site is a feedback form so you can send your ideas about classifications.
