Eliciting pedagogical metadata for description of learning resources

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. 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 very little pedagogical metadata in current repositories. Software tools are needed that offer resource designers an d instructors incentives to create and share pedagogical metadata. To demonstrate this concept, an online tool was developed to assist 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 experience in e-learning. Participants reported positive attitudes towards the effectiveness, usefulness and necessity of the tool.