Complete Metadata Records in Learning Object Repositories: Some Evidence and Requirements

A learning object can be considered as a unit of instructional content for which a metadata record describing its characteristics and intended educational usage is provided. Metadata records can be used to develop effective search and location of learning objects, and also to develop automated or semi-automated selection and composition tools. In consequence, the quality of metadata records is a critical point for applications, especially if consistent and standardized software tools are desired. Completeness is one of the essential facets of metadata quality, which can be defined in terms of the metadata elements required for each functionality or usage. The eventual emergence of a global space for learning object-based education requires the creation of learning object repositories providing large collections of contents in a form accessible to standardized software. These repositories are called to play a central role in automated approaches to e-learning, since they provide the required support for learning object access and search facilities, oriented not only to humans but to software agents or systems. In consequence, completeness of metadata records becomes a key requirement for learning object repositories. Nonetheless, metadata creation is a time-consuming and laborious process, and current basic standards for learning object metadata allow for a large degree of flexibility in metadata edition. These two factors combined may eventually result in incomplete and poorly structured metadata. In this paper, the completeness of learning object metadata of samples obtained from the MERLOT and CAREO repositories are analyzed from that viewpoint, using the IEEE LOM standard as a reference framework. The paper concludes with a proposal for the specification of complet..