Eliciting Pedagogical Metadata for Ontological Description of Learning Resources

Candidate: Wenting Ma
Type: Master of Science (MSc), School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Date: July 24, 2006
Senior Supervisor: John Nesbit
Thesis: Download Thesis Document

Abstract

Learning object metadata standards exist to facilitate the reusability and discoverability of digital learning resources. However, without extension, these standards are ineffective to support the assembly of learning objects into coherent, larger scale structures such as online courses. Ontological capture of pedagogical metadata may be critical to developing theory-aware systems capable of recommending complementary resources. In this research, scanning 74 repositories revealed that there is, in fact, very little pedagogical metadata in current repositories. There is a need for software tools which offer resource designers and instructors incentives to create and share pedagogical metadata. To demonstrate this concept, an online tool was created which assists in the creation of learning objectives conforming to the revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. The effectiveness of the tool for eliciting pedagogical metadata was assessed by collecting evaluative data from users with expertise in learning design.