1. Terminologies in Education Teachers, Learners & Learning Resources Sarah Currier CETIS Educational Content SIG Coordinator Centre for Academic Practice, University of Strathclyde JISC Terminologies Workshop, 13 February 2004, London

2. In e-Learning: Basic similarities- need for widely agreed subject vocabularies and classification schemes – BUT: Requirement for more flexible updating, curriculum based vs. pure discipline based. (JORUM+ - DDC vs. LearnDirect) Dublin Core (DC-Ed) vs. IEEE Learning Object Metadata Disparate communities coming together now- needing agreement on approach to vocabularies for metadata elements. IMS Digital Repositories Specification. Developing their own specs for vocabularies now as well: IMS VDEX (Vocabularies Definition (for) Exchange) Educationally specific vocabularies for attributes other than subject/discipline – each with its own difficulties. See UK LOM Core, RLLOMAP. Different levels of education requiring different levels of subject vocabulary.

3. Cultural differences: expectation of user (learner and teacher) centred design, utilisation of teachers expertise, and increasingly, ideas about learner input See Stor Curam Project – utilising card sort/cluster analysis methodology. See SeSDL vs. RESULTS portal. See DIDET project- teaching students information literacy with shared repository- problems with keyword indexing. In e-learning there are a lot of learning resources – from learning objects to courses – require specialised kind of descriptions Different types of storage and delivery – repositories, VLEs, etc. Resistance to acknowledging the level of resourcing and expertise needed around metadata creation in general and vocabularies in particular Not much expertise yet available for metadata creation or terminology management – although they are beginning to recognise the need for specialist input there are very few librarians/knowledge managers/info. scientists around with the right kind of expertise

4. See: + CETIS Metadata & Digital Repositories SIG – 2 JISCmail lists- one for technical metadata issues, one for cataloguing issues. http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/ + Research paper on metadata for elearning & quality- email me or look at above URL. + Stor Curam Repository Project: sarah.currier@strath.ac.uk