OpenCourseWare Consortium Conferences

• tag discussion OCWC09meta

Notes:

• Defining metadata: information about a learning object that is not necesarily part of the content itself.  Atributes of the content.
• Find a better overlap between OCWC needs and institutional needs (from metadata)
• There is a lot of metadata that is generated during the entire life cycle of an open course but most of it is not being captured.  i.e. We use information about the content to decide if and how we create/publish, but we just don't call it metadata and don't capture it.
  
• At OU UK, metadata is used to broadcast via RSS, OAI, and export to packing formats... but regardless of the medium the same metadata fields are utilized.
• Possible new fields:
  - department (discipline, school, area of study, etc.) - currently the subject/keyword/category field is often being used for this
  - instructor - something separate from the creator of the content in that format (limited use)
  - prerequisite or some similar field for referring related content, but perhaps some way to determine a sequence (prerequisite and "what's next?")
• possibly work towards a standardized list of keywords to make translation easier