Metadata and the sustainability of open teaching

A new study by HIS-HE has inves­ti­gated how didac­tic meta­data can con­tribute to strength­en­ing open teach­ing prac­tice.

While the infra­struc­tures for open edu­ca­tion, such as the wide range offered by the twillo por­tal, have been fur­ther dif­fer­en­ti­ated for years, the re-use of open teach­ing mate­ri­als in the higher edu­ca­tion sec­tor seems to remain at a con­sis­tently low level. It is unclear how a broader re-use of open teach­ing and learn­ing mate­ri­als (Open Edu­ca­tional Resources, OER) can be achieved. One fac­tor that has received too lit­tle atten­tion to date is the index­ing of OER. The unpop­u­lar task of a dif­fer­en­ti­ated descrip­tion of OER with meta­data is of cen­tral impor­tance when it comes to the sus­tain­able pro­vi­sion and reuse of OER. This is the con­clu­sion of a study on didac­tic meta­data in OER and teach­ing por­tals, which was car­ried out in the con­text of twillo and pro­vides an overview of the cur­rent prac­tice of tag­ging OER.

High-qual­ity offer­ings of open uni­ver­sity teach­ing depend on numer­ous fac­tors, not only in the con­text of the twillo por­tal. Open teach­ing and learn­ing offer­ings require suit­able pre­req­ui­sites on an infra­struc­tural, tech­ni­cal, orga­ni­za­tional and didac­tic level, but these are at best a sine qua non for the suc­cess of open uni­ver­sity teach­ing. In order for open edu­ca­tion to become sus­tain­able and for OER to be reused in a vari­ety of ways, fur­ther frame­work con­di­tions must also be guar­an­teed in the sense of a con­di­tio per quam. In order to improve the con­di­tions for open teach­ing, it is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant to make it as easy as pos­si­ble for teach­ers to find open teach­ing and learn­ing mate­ri­als that they can use for their own courses.

Teach­ers can only check inter­net doc­u­ments, videos, images and other learn­ing objects pro­vided on OER por­tals such as twillo for reusabil­ity with a man­age­able amount of effort if the mate­ri­als are more than just super­fi­cially indexed. Teach­ing and learn­ing mate­ri­als that do not con­tain any accom­pa­ny­ing infor­ma­tion on the con­text of ori­gin, access and license rights, didac­tics or tech­nol­ogy are not very trans­par­ent for poten­tial reusers and require reusers to carry out a time-con­sum­ing case-by-case exam­i­na­tion. In order to keep the nec­es­sary effort for poten­tial reusers to a min­i­mum, mean­ing­ful meta­data is required. Didac­tic meta­data is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for sub­se­quent use in spe­cific courses.

The HIS Insti­tute for Higher Edu­ca­tion Devel­op­ment (HIS-HE), the Vir­tual Cam­pus Rhineland-Palati­nate (VCRP), the office of the state por­tal ORCA.nrw and the foun­da­tion itself inves­ti­gated the ques­tions as part of a coop­er­a­tion funded by the Foun­da­tion for Inno­va­tion in Higher Edu­ca­tion,

• which approaches cur­rently exist for map­ping the didac­tic dimen­sions of OER in meta­data stan­dards,
• in what form didac­tic sce­nar­ios can be described in uni­ver­sity teach­ing and
• which didac­tic (min­i­mum) spec­i­fi­ca­tions are nec­es­sary and help­ful to ensure greater re-use of OER.
  

Based on dif­fer­en­ti­ated desk research and a qual­i­ta­tive sur­vey of eleven experts in the con­text of guided inter­views, the recently pub­lished report­The report Didac­tic Meta­data in OER and Teach­ing Por­tals, which has just been pub­lished, is based on dif­fer­en­ti­ated desk research and a qual­i­ta­tive sur­vey of eleven experts in the con­text of guided inter­views. It exam­ines the map­ping of didac­tic dimen­sions in selected meta­data stan­dards such as “Learn­ing Objects Meta­data” (LOM) and “Gen­eral Meta­data Pro­file for Edu­ca­tional Resources” (AMB), high­lights future pos­si­bil­i­ties for auto­mated index­ing of OER and makes rec­om­men­da­tions on how the descrip­tion of teach­ing mate­ri­als using meta­data can sig­nif­i­cantly reduce the trans­fer costs of poten­tial reusers:and how didac­tic meta­data can con­tribute to valu­able didac­tic self-reflec­tion in uni­ver­sity teach­ing.

Down­load: Wan­nemacher, K.; Stein, M.; Kae­mena, A.: Didac­tic meta­data in OER and teach­ing por­tals. From the premise of ped­a­gog­i­cal neu­tral­ity to the strength­en­ing of open teach­ing prac­tice . Hanover: HIS-HE 2024 (Forum Hochschu­len­twick­lung 1|2024).