Learning Resource Metadata Initiative Webinar

Later this week my colleague Phil Barker and I will be giving a webinar on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) as part of the ASIS&T DCMI webinar series.  The webinar takes place on Wednesday 19th at 15.00 UTC and you can register here.  Registration costs $25 and a recording of the webinar will be made freely available after the event.

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) is a collaborative initiative that aims to make it easier for teachers and learners to find educational materials through major search engines and specialized resource discovery services. The approach taken by LRMI is to extend the schema.org ontology so that educationally significant characteristics and relationships can be expressed. In this webinar, Phil Barker and Lorna M. Campbell of Cetis will introduce schema.org and present the background to LRMI, its aims and objectives, and who is involved in achieving them. The webinar will outline the technical aspects of the LRMI specification, describe some example implementations and demonstrate how the discoverability of learning resources may be enhanced. Phil and Lorna will present the latest developments in LRMI implementation, drawing on an analysis of its use by a range of open educational resource repositories and aggregators, and will report on the potential of LRMI to enhance education search and discovery services. Whereas the development of LRMI has been inspired by schema.org, the webinar will also include discussion of whether LRMI has applications beyond those of schema.org.

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A new home for LRMI

I’m rather late with this post, but I was very pleased to see the announcement last week that

leadership and governance of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), an education metadata project developed to improve discoverability and delivery of learning resources, have transferred from the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)

Having been involved with the LRMI project for the last year, I’m well aware of the significant time and effort that has gone into establishing a robust and sustainable governance model to ensure that the LRMI specification is curated and maintained beyond the initiative’s funded phase.  The project team strongly believed that LRMI required a governance model that preserves the open, collaborative, user-driven nature that has characterised the development of the specification, while also providing a path to formal standardization and the credibility and fidelity that accompany it.  With its strong track record of supporting communities of practice around metadata design, innovation and best practice, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is well placed to meet all these requirements.

You can read more about the agreement to transfer LRMI to DCMI here LRMI Transfers Stewardship, and my colleague Phil Barker has written an excellent blog post about what this means for the future of LRMI here  LRMI Moving to Dublin Core.