Part 1 of Report of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC36 WG2 Study Group: "Metadata for Synchronous and Asynchronous

This paper proposes a data-model for the standardized representation of both synchronous and asynchronous text-based and other communications. Such communications are widely used in e-learning practice today, and have been studied under the rubrics of "computer conferencing," "Computer-Mediated Communication" (CMC), "Computer Supported Collaborative Learning" (CSCL), and many other names and titles. This paper begins with an overview of this rich research tradition to date, and of its relation to metadata and relevant standardization activities. It then considers the use of these communication and collaboration technologies in educational settings and software systems. It identifies specifiable uniformities in the structural and behavioural characteristics of these systems, and then uses these uniformities as a basis for its proposed data or metadata model. This paper then concludes by considering the advantages presented by such a standardized model, which extend from data portability and system independence to new possibilities for automated evaluation or analysis of communication data, and performance.