I am new to OERs and while I am a librarian by education, metadata is a whole complex world with the different options from DC to LOM to LRMI and the different facets of each.
I am surprised to find so little shared in the open about approaches to OER metadata and according to recent research (not published in the open), the metadata when used, is not serving us and our community well or effectively:
W. Simão de Deus and E. Francine Barbosa, “The Use of Metadata in Open Educational Resources Repositories: An Exploratory Study,” 2020 IEEE 44th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) , Madrid, Spain, 2020, pp. 123-132, doi: 10.1109/COMPSAC48688.2020.00025. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9202802
I want to find folks interested and excited about working together on best approaches to metadata, sharing ideas and publishing about it in the open.
If you are someone interested or experienced in this area of work, please reply to the post, so we can connect!
If you know of resources about OER metadata best practices, please share in the thread as well!
There was a session on MoodleNet yesterday that talked about metadata. Martin Dougiamas, who gave that session, referenced a variety of metadata standards they are using. The video for that session has already been posted here in OEG Connect. Hope this is helpful.
Thank you for starting this thread! I know we’ve already briefly connected (and I’m excited to have you at our OER Policy & Metadata presentation later today), but I’d love to connect and share more of the metadata work I’ve been doing the past few months. You’re absolutely right - metadata is a big topic to jump into and there is simultaneously a lot and very little about OER-specific metadata. The more we can come together and talk about it, the better!
Thank you Paul, I must have missed it either due to timezone constraints or did not realize it covered this, thank you so much for sharing! I will be sure to review!
@notmarian and @Quill since you were excited about ‘controlled vocabularies’ , even though they maybe used for other purposes than OER tagging I am wondering if you have anything to share on this topic?
Thanks for the invite @Ksenia_C. While I generally support and believe in the need for strong metadata- I’m not well-versed in it outside of what I learned in the one cataloging class I took a very long time ago. I’m super happy to contribute my enthusiastic encouragement, but I’m not sure that I can contribute lots to the central conversation.
Martin Dougiamas’s talk was super interesting, but one of my take homes was that it is a very difficult problem because of the sheer variety of materials to be cataloged.
I think as the volume of OE resources and tools grow, there will be an increasing need for meta-data that helps with tasks like categorization, findability, and data exchange. Although I have limited experience in OER meta-data, I do have substantial experience working with data models more generally and would be happy to donate some time to learn more about OE meta-data frameworks and build models that can support the community needs.
@JoshHalpern - I would agree that the large amounts - and perhaps the loosely structured nature - of data make this a challenging task.
My partner @iwonajs is a PhD researcher in AI / Natural Language Processing. Perhaps we can leverage some of our compute resources to aid in this task…
I’m available all week and would be happy to setup a video chat / collaboration session to discuss further!
Hello! I would recommend reaching out to Bobby Bothmann, Metadata Librarian at Minnesota State University. He worked on OER Metadata for his capstone project in the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, which included an overview of current schema and an analysis of best practices among them.
@Shawn@Ksenia_C@samedi If would be interested in joining this conversation if you set up a session! I am located in Utah/MST, United States and generally available this week.
Thank so much for the suggestion Abbey. I am aware that there is some excellent work on the metadata front being done by SPARC, but it is always good to have a specific point of reference,
@Shawn thank you so much for your message, linked and structured data are certainly connected to metadata and AI could play a huge role in discoverability of content.
Personally, I don’t think I know enough about the different metadata schemas and the challenges yet to have a meaningful discussion about ways to support that. I will, however, add your name and your partner’s to my list of people to reach out to in the future. I think it might be a valuable conversation a few months down the road.
Unless of course, @AnitaYT you have a lot of experience with OER metadata and would like to lead this?
Personally, I don’t think I know enough about the different metadata schemas and the challenges yet to have a meaningful discussion about ways to support that. I will, however, add your name and your partner’s to my list of people to reach out to in the future. I think it might be a valuable conversation a few months down the road.
Unless of course, @AnitaYT you have a lot of experience with OER metadata and would like to lead this?
Haha, I know just enough to make a fool of myself. I would not be able to lead a scholarly discussion on metadata, data models, AI/ML. I have some practical experience in using HTML tags and alt-text for enhancing SEO and Universal Design, respectively, in digital content — websites, MS Word, PDFs, Pressbooks, etc.
There were some presentations at last week’s Open Ed that cover metatdata and discovery. The video stream links now go to the YouTube videos. I didn’t notice anyone mention these yet, but appologies if I just missed it.
I know there are a great many considerations, but I think that it’s really important to make OER discoverable and understandable to commercial search engines. From what I understand from other library-led SEO, structured data, and linked data projects schema.org can be a big part of this and it seems like there is work underway to extend that for the schema type called learning resource.
Within our open source project for an OER Search Index https://www.oersi.org we set on schema.org/CreativeWork for import and export of metadata. At the moment we use a german vocabulary for subjects and resource types, but maybe we should switch/map to ISCED as mentioned by MoodleNet.
I hope to find a few other possible collaborators that we may not have been aware of 
I would not be able to lead a scholarly discussion on metadata, data models, AI/ML. I have some practical experience in using HTML tags and alt-text for enhancing SEO and Universal Design, respectively, in digital content — websites, MS Word, PDFs, Pressbooks, etc.