Adopting the metadata approach to improve the search and analysis of educational resources for online learning

The emergence of large collections of learning resources created through the harvesting and aggregation of metadata raises important concerns on the suitability of educational resource descriptions as provided in metadata schemas. For learning purposes, both teachers and students usually seek information on their own, and the vast majority of the search that they do in search engines like Google is driven by multiple keywords or classifications. Therefore this type of metadata-based learning resources could help them obtain better results related to the educational resources they are looking for and provide the basis for collaborative learning environments which enable knowledge sharing and reuse in terms of web-based search systems. This paper reports an exploratory study based on the availability and suitability of keywords and classifications in metadata-based educational resources to improve collaborative learning between teachers and students through the search and analysis of learning resources from a large sample obtained from the Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE).