DCMI Education Community

DCMI Education Working Group

DC-9 Tokyo Breakout Session Report

The DC-Education Working Group (WG) met in a breakout session on Monday 22 October 2001 during the DC Workshop in Tokyo to review work accomplished to date and to chart the 2001-2002 work agenda. A PowerPoint presentation with a proposed Working Group agenda was used to guide the discussion during the breakout session. After a brief review of the history of the WG by the co-chairs, the participants were briefed on the formal recommendations for education-specific elements and element qualifiers that the Usage Board (UB) issued at its meeting at OCLC in May in Dublin, Ohio including: (1) an Audience element, (2) a Mediator qualifier for the Audience element, and (3) a Conforms To qualifier for the Relation element. All three of these recommendations now officially exist in the DCMI terms namespace. Work is underway to update documentation at the DCMI web site.

The WG then discussed the status of the DCMI/IEEE LOM Memorandum of Understanding.¹ The co-chairs reported on a meeting of representatives from DCMI, IEEE LTSC, IMS, EdNA (Education Network Australia), and GEM (Gateway to Educational Materials) in Ottawa where plans were set out to operationalize the intent of the MoU. The participants in Ottawa issued a document titled the Ottawa Communiqué that sets out a work agenda.² The co-chairs reported further that work was well underway on a metadata manifesto that sets out the mutual understandings of IEEE LTSC and DCMI with regard to modular, interoperable metadata and that a formal document embodying those understandings was nearing completion. Additional information can be found in the PowerPoint presentation in cells 9-11.

The co-chairs reported that over the course of the past year, WG listserv discussions had reached a consensus regarding an additional qualifier for the Audience element with the name Level with the following description: A general statement describing the education or training sector. Alternatively, a more specific statement of the location of the audience in terms of its progression through an education or training sector. When documentation of the proposal is completed, it will be sent to the UB pursuant to its procedures.

The WG then discussed the status of its work on an education specific resource type vocabulary. Work on the vocabulary had been suspended in light of the discussions in the Type WG with regard to a possible DCT2 vocabulary. It was thought that any work in the Education WG should be compatible with any architecture defined by the Type WG. Subsequent to the Education breakout session, it was learned that the Type WG had dropped its intentions to pursue a DCT2 vocabulary and to rely instead on work by domain/practice communities. Thus, the Education work in this regard will be revived.

The participants discussed the work done over the past year to determine whether additional Audience element qualifiers might be justified. It reviewed the draft document summarizing the use of audience descriptors in an array of current projects.³ The discussion focused on several categories of metadata statements that might suggest the need for an Accessibility qualifier. Discussion of this possibility will be moved to the DC-Education listserv. During the Workshop, there was an interest group formed to explore the issues of accessibility in the larger context of DCMI-based metadata.

There was brief discussion of a very early working draft of statements gleaned from a handful of education-based metadata projects with regard to teaching processes and characteristics.⁴ It is the intention of the co-chairs to continue the development of this draft document through discussions on the listserv. The goal is to determine whether an education-specific element to capture such statements might be justified. Such a determination cannot be had without additional input into the working document and further discussion over the course of the coming year.

The WG decided that there was a need for discussion this coming year regarding the need to capture metadata statements dealing with learning objectives that are local or intrinsic to a resource. In the conformsTo recommendation issued by the UB, it is possible to reference external standards/benchmarks/frameworks to which a resource may be correlated. The focus of this new discussion is on objectives that may have nothing to do with external criteria but are purely local to the resource but nevertheless useful for purposes of discovery.

Specific dates for deliverables are outlined on cell 13 of the PowerPoint presentation.

Jon Mason & Stuart Sutton, Co-chairs