learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Antonios Andreatos
knowledge space, called the Workplace Learning Context. LOs stored in the knowledge space,
encoding the organisation's knowledge, are assigned a number of concepts from a domain-specific
ontology in the form of metadata. The system keeps a historical learning profile for each employee
based on tasks performed in the past; then it uses this profile to find and propose LOs related to
competencies needed in order to successfully carry out future assigned tasks (Ley et al., 2008: p.
2103).
Figure 2: Search results from the “Help” of OpenOffice suite are based on metadata
From the above examples it comes out that a proper metadata assignment and process scheme can
greatly facilitate the search of proper LOs, as well as, the construction of proper courses tailored to
specific or personalised needs.
But when it comes to OER from various sources, by various authors, made to cover different needs,
with minimum and incompatible metadata, there is a problem. Τhere is a great difficulty to classify,
search and recover LOs according to specific criteria; moreover, there is no uniformity, no quality
guarantee, nothing. The following three figures show metadata concerning LOs about Stakeholder
Analysis from three different repositories.
As Andreatos & Katsoulis (2011) have noticed, there is also a lot of good quality educational LOs in
New Media formats (flash content, presentations, webcasts, podcasts etc.), stored in general-purpose
New Media sites such as YouTube. All resources stored in YouTube are accompanied by metadata
information, as well as, statistics such as number of views, “likes” and “dislikes” and users' comments.
Another important feature of YouTube is the projection of related videos. It is noticeable that famous
universities and university professors maintain their own New Media channels (Figure 6).
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