Managing content in e-learning environments

The use of e-learning environments to support teaching and learning has had great impact on the way content is developed and managed. In most cases, both teachers and students have had to re-adapt the way they prepare, access and engage with educational matter. The adjustment in human mechanisms for organising and interacting with educational content has become necessary due to the re-mediation of established practices through the introduction of software-based techniques to structure content, for example, using metadata. Whilst metadata standards provide effective guidelines for organising content in web-based e-learning environments, technology-based approaches to managing educational resources do not fully address social-cultural and pedagogical aspects of users in the context in which teaching and learning takes place. In this regard, the effectiveness of using metadata to structure the discovery and access to educational content should be considered in relation to the extent by which metadata descriptors are associated with established socio-cultural and pedagogical practices. Towards this end, we reflect on potential contributions of social-cultural and learning theories to the task of managing content in e-learning environments. The paper presents an activitycentred approach to abstracting contextually and pedagogically enriched metadata descriptions of educational content and interactions with learning objects. Introduction Traditionally, the task of managing educational content in learning institutions has been the responsibility of teachers and archivist or librarians (Greenberg, 2000). However, the current surge to implement information and communication technologies (ICT) within teaching and learning processes has created an inevitable need to store, 454 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 36 No 3 2005 © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2005. access and distribute educational resources via technology-based systems, particularly databases and web-based systems. This entails converting and restructuring educational resources into formats that are suitable for technology storage and delivery. Consequently, this transition has had great implications for both teachers and students as creators and users of educational content. As a result of this situation, there is the inevitable need for developers of educational technology to involve technical, information, and educational specialist when handling issues relating to managing and distributing educational content in e-learning environments. This development indicates recognition of the significance of pedagogical accountability in computer-based techniques introduced to manage educational content. In this regard, pedagogy-oriented international standards are being introduced to counterbalance technological focus in ICT-based techniques for managing educational content (IEEE-LTSC, 2002). These techniques include, for example the use of metadata to structure content into objects that can be described and tagged for the purpose of reusing, referencing, and controlling the flow and access to information (Hackos, 2002). However, whilst the use of metadata standards can enable users to search and discover information more efficiently, it is the usefulness or relevance of the discovered content to the purpose and context of use that matters most to the user. Therefore, inadequate or inappropriate accountability of relevant contextual and pedagogical perspectives during metadata abstraction can result in misinterpretation of the user’s motives or objectives for searching and interacting with objects in the e-learning environment (Lim, 2002). In order to examine issues raised in foregoing discussions in relation to the task of managing content in e-learning environments, we investigated the potential contribution of specific social–cultural and learning theories as a framework for conceptualising metadata categorisations and descriptions. The aim was to produce pedagogically meaningful and contextually relevant descriptions of content. In so doing, we focused on understanding contextual approaches to developing, using, and managing content by studying: 1. the nature of activities involved in managing educational content; 2. the methods and tools used to interact with learning objects; and 3. the purpose for which users interact with learning objects. The study employs the paradigm of human activity as the unit of analysis so as to examine ways in which teaching and learning activities shape, and are shaped by, relationships, mediators, motives, and social–cultural influences from the environment in which content is created and used. Therefore, we considered the task of understanding and describing activities in context as an integral part of the metadata abstraction. This is due to the fact that acquired contextual insight is considered to be crucial to the appropriate categorisation and description of education content. What is metadata? The formal definition of metadata is data about data (Greenberg, 2000). Metadata is structured information that describes characteristics of a learning object, whereby the Managing content in e-learning environments 455 © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2005. term learning object refers to an entity or learning resources that can be presented in both digital and nondigital form (IEEE-LTSC, 2002). Examples of learning objects include multimedia content, instructional content, learning objectives, instructional software and software tools, and persons, organisations, or events referenced during technology-supported learning (IEEE-LTSC, 2002; (Suthers, Johnson & Tillinghast, 2002). This broadened definition of learning objects is important for our purposes because it recognises the significance of various forms of resources used in teaching and learning including human and nonhuman elements. One of the main reasons for structuring educational content is to group it into meaningful categories that can be referenced, searched, accessed, and updated by authorised users. Therefore, in order to categorise and describe learning objects meaningfully, content stakeholders (ie, users, creators, etc) need to establish common semantics for interpreting key characteristics of learning objects according to established practices of the context of use. In this regard, semantic metadata uses meaningful tags to label objects according to the nature of the content available inside the object itself as opposed to format tags that label information according to the structure or appearance of elements of the object (Hackos, 2002). The key point to note about semantic metadata is that effective use of semantic tags to enhance meaningfulness in content management is dependent on the awareness of issues and practices of the context from which objects are generated. In the meanwhile, contextual knowledge can relate to several aspects of content, including the description of activities and procedures involved in preparing materials and delivering teaching instructions. As a result, semantic knowledge about educational content is not always explicit, but may be evident in local cultural norms whose existence, execution procedure, and implications are not always formally documented. Towards this end, several standards have been introduced to provide guidelines and facilitate consistence in metadata abstraction. Some of the metadata standards are targeted towards the characterisation of educational content, for example the Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard introduced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) (http://ltsc.ieee.org/: IEEE-LTSC).