Metadata for Learning Objects – a Cure for Information Overflow?

Information overflow is one of the downsides that digitalisation brought with it. This obvious fact also applies to the field of e-learning. For this reason, concepts and systems supporting learners in handling the enormous amount of information – such as personal learning environments – have recently gained more attention. It gets more and more important to offer individual capabilities to store, retrieve, and keep track of the different learning contents or learning objects. Of course, metadata can be very useful to organise learning objects. Therefore, we have examined different metadata standards. Based on our insights, we developed a structure of metadata attributes in order to efficiently store learning objects. The results are presented in this paper. Also, thoughts on how to gain this metadata by employing different specific standards are given. To our understanding the use of a reasonable subset of metadata supports tutors and learners at the same time.