The Need for Standardization of Context Metadata for e-Learning Environments

This paper addresses the urgent need for international standardization of Context Metadata for e-Learning environments. In particular, E-Learning when distributed over the Internet, can synchronously and asynchronously reach a huge number of learners but also has to deal with a variety of different cultures and societies and the related complications. A lot of the differences strongly demand adaptation processes in which especially the contents are being modified to fit the needs in the targeted contexts. In our approach solving this task, we determined a list of around 160 significant possible differences and defined those as context metadata. In this paper, we show the results of our research regarding to the determination of context related influence factors as well as approaches to deal with them and present a first specification of the representing context-metadata