Science Education resources supported with educational metadata: The case of the OpenScienceResources Web Repository

Abstract

A number of international initiatives, such as the leading initiative of Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, have recognized the worth of sharing and reusing educational resources among educational communities. This has become an important issue in the field of Technology-enhanced Science Education, and over the past years a large amount of science education digital content became available worldwide through digital repositories, archives and libraries. However, efficient search and retrieval of science education resources available in web-based repositories depends on their educational metadata. Although the IEEE LOM Standard is the commonly accepted way for describing educational resources with metadata, it is beyond its scope to directly support the description of educational resources with Science Education related metadata. Thus, we propose an IEEE LOM Science Education Application Profile that can be used for tagging science education resources, and we present its application to a Science Education Web-based Repository, namely, the OpenScienceResources Web Repository. © 2011 American Scientific Publishers.