Towards a Sharable Digital Library of Reusable Teaching Resources

Towards a Sharable Digital Library of Reusable Teaching Resources: Roles for Rich Metadata

David McArthur, Sarah Giersch, Bill Graves

Eduprise

Charles R. Ward, Richard Dillaman, Russell Herman, Gabriel Lugo,
James Reeves, Ron Vetter

University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Ed Fox, Hussein Suleman

Virginia Tech

Deborah Knox

The College of New Jersey

Scott Owen

Georgia State University

Submitted to the Journal on Educational Resources in Computing
Feb 1, 2001

Contact:

Abstract

Faculty across the country have created a wealth of digital resources for teaching and are willing to share them; but they lack a repository where they can submit their materials, find related ones, create new content, and exchange them with others. iLumina is a digital library of undergraduate teaching materials for science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) education that will provide such a repository, and related community and user services. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the structure of iLumina, emphasizing the several roles that IMS metadata play in organizing library resources and supporting users services. We argue that iLumina’s metadata will not only help users discover appropriate resources – the typical role for such descriptions – but can also help manage reviews of resources, coordinate the community construction of metadata, and connect library users to one another.

INDEX TERMS

Categories and Subject Descriptors:

Information Systems – Information Storage and Retrieval-Digital Libraries (H.3.7): Collection; Standards; User Issues

Computing Milieux – Computer Uses in Education (K.3.1):
Distance Learning; Collaborative Learning

Keywords:

Distributed Systems, Metadata, XML

A Sharable Digital Library 16

The goal: Sharing and reusing online teaching resources

Communities of educators have often created course materials by peer-to-peer exchange of resources that are then combined into larger modules. Such home-grown materials—from lecture notes, to informal demonstrations, to assignments and quizzes—can often be combined in flexible ways with mass-market textbooks to build tailored courses and curricula. One problem with this community-sharing model, though, is that it does not scale-up, largely because traditional educational communities have been geographically separate. The best materials in one region are often unknown to distant faculty who might value them, use them, and improve them. Conversely, mediocre content may endure in one area because geography protects it from competition from outside resources.

These market inefficiencies and scaling failures are among the reasons that publishers now dominate the production and distribution of teaching materials, from primary school to post-graduate studies. But this model, too, has its limitations—not necessarily in terms of scalability, but in terms of the speed of publication and the variety of published materials (see [Borgman 2000], for an insightful discussion of modern publishers and their competitors). To keep margins high, publishers concentrate on big production runs of a relatively few, large-scale products, such as textbooks and software packages. However, in education there is a continuing strong demand for a more diverse set of smaller “learning components” that faculty and instructors can plug together and tailor into personalized courses [Roschelle et al. 1999].

The limitations of the publisher-based model have encouraged a growing number of projects to try to remedy the scalability problems of the community-sharing model. One main approach uses the Internet. Although small-scale educational communities are often physically insular, digital exchanges, designed effectively, can allow faculty to share online instructional resources regardless of location, creating much larger “virtual” communities, and potentially overcoming the market failures of traditional informal course-content exchange communities.

This is the basic premise behind iLumina, a digital library of undergraduate teaching materials in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) education that is being developed by Eduprise, The University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Georgia State University, Grand Valley State, and Virginia Tech.[1] Our experience suggests that faculty across the country have already created a wealth of digital resources for teaching—often small in scale, such as a well-crafted image—and are willing to share them. But they lack a repository where they can submit their materials, find related ones (without having to reinvent them), create new content (either individually or through collaboration), and, collectively, improve both the quantity and quality of digital teaching resources. iLumina will try to provide such a repository, and related user services.

In this brief paper we provide an overview of iLumina and discuss how it is attempting to foster an online community-sharing model of course-material creation and reuse. The first section sketches the structure of the digital library. Following this we outline the challenges confronting iLumina. Our work is building on several related projects, such as the NationalEngineering Education DeliverySystem (NEEDS) and the Connected Curriculum Project (CCP), that have already begun to explore this area. One way we complement these projects is our emphasis on the use of rich metadata to underpin an array of digital library services. We therefore devote most of the paper to an overview of the roles that such metadata can play in meeting the challenges faced by iLumina. For more information on our project, see www.ilumina-project.org.

The approach: Overview of iLumina

The driving vision of iLumina is to provide a platform of content and services that will dramatically improve the ability of faculty to create and exchange educational materials, across a wide range of science, math and engineering disciplines. These resources will frequently be learning fragments, even single images, rather than large course segments. iLumina therefore must provide tools and services that motivate educators to create new resources from these pieces, as well as offer a diverse collection of materials to the communities that it serves.

To promote the acquisition of a wide range of content, iLumina will rely on a varied set of contributing partners, whose materials can follow several distinct migration paths into the library. As Figure 1 [A] illustrates, streams of resources can come from existing repositories whose materials have already been peer-reviewed and are set to be cataloged into iLumina. Our partners contributing reviewed materials are the Computer Science Teaching Center (CSTC; www.cstc.org), and the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee’s Digital Library (SECDL; www.education.siggraph.org). iLumina represents an additional distribution channel for such repositories. A second set of providers will be submitting resources that have not undergone independent assessment; they will be accepted only after review, which will be contributed by other members of the iLumina community (Figure 1 [B]). Currently, most of these new resources will come from faculty at UNC Wilmington. Developers from the CCP [www.math.duke.edu/education/ccp/] and Mathwright [www.mathwright.com] projects also will contribute. For some of these providers, iLumina will be their first distribution channel. In the future we hope to open up both of these migration paths to a much broader set of content suppliers.

Reviewed resources accepted from UNCW and other iLumina content providers will not be placed directly into iLumina, but rather will reside in additional content repositories, analogous to CSTC and SECDL. As Figure 1 ([C] and [D]) indicates, iLumina itself will actually be a repository not of the content supplied by providers, but only of the metadata associated with these distributed resources. This metadata will be compiled in two phases. First, we require each of the iLumina content repositories to adhere to specifications proposed by the Open Archives Initiative [Van de Sompel and Legoze 2000; Open Archives 2001]. Because repositories comply with these “data provider” conventions, iLumina, as a “service provider” will be able to harvest metadata from the component repositories, as needed. Specifically, metadata exported in the iLumina and Dublin Core formats will be harvested from CSTC and SECDL into the iLumina open archive, and so placed into the library. Metadata for resources supplied by other project partners, such as UNCW, will not need transformation, because they will be created “from scratch”, by metadata tools that comply with the iLumina metadata specification.

Figure1—Overview of the acquisition and creation processes for iLumina resources.

iLumina will expect project partners that own the component repositories to manage their content, ensuring that all resources are preserved and that links remain valid and up-to-date. Component repositories also can offer their own user-services (as do CSTC and SECDL; see Figure 2), in addition to providing data for iLumina. However, iLumina’s main role will be to make the content of the federated repositories available through a centralized web-based interface that includes a collection of user services which rely on a foundation of standardized metadata (Figure 1 [E]). Since the initial version of iLumina will include only free digital content, library users will be able to download digital copies of resources and reuse them without constraints—at least for personal, non-commercial purposes. Users also will be encouraged to employ iLumina authoring to create new modules. For example, a faculty member might compose a titration simulation and graphing applet, found through independent iLumina library researches, into a larger chemistry-course fragment. Finally, as the upward arrows in Figure 1 [F] suggest, the faculty user could submit such newly-created content for inclusion into iLumina, completing the library life-cycle. It is in this sense that we see iLumina as an organic digital library, tying together an expanding community of users and developers who collaboratively construct and share learning resources.

Figure2—The CSTC website.

CSTC not only provides resources (metadata) for iLumina, but also offers its content directly to end-users, through a set of search, review and submission services.

Challenges: What will it take to make iLumina succeed?

iLumina must jump many hurdles, both technical and social, before it becomes a valuable source of reusable digital educational materials in science and mathematics. At a minimum, it will need to be designed to accommodate diversity along several dimensions. Materials will cover a wide collection of disciplines; different vocabularies and classification schemes will be needed to describe them in ways that are comprehensible to their various user communities. Resources must span a similarly extensive array of technical formats, from simple pictures to Java applets to complex applications. The “grain-size” of library content, in other words, will range from digital “atoms” to structured components.

In short, iLumina will need to provide relatively traditional user-services that support the selection, description, organization, distribution and preservation of materials. Some of the problems confronting iLumina in these areas are shared by many digital (and non-digital) library ventures. However, other challenges are specific to our goal of serving educators who not only will want to access high-quality learning objects, but also must be able to create new library content by building on existing resources. iLumina will need to describe resources in relatively education-specific terms; for instance, expressing multiple pedagogical purposes and different learning “types” (e.g., tests, simulations, experiments, etc.). At the same time, the library also must include a number of innovative user services, including tools to author and repackage learning objects, to comment on and rate materials, and perhaps to work collaboratively with other educators that belong to the iLumina community.

Focus: The roles of learning metadata

The iLumina project will be developing a collection of web-based tools and interfaces to meet some of these challenges. In this brief paper we focus only on the role of metadata, in part because they are the foundation of several key user services. We first review the structure of iLumina’s metadata, and then provide a few examples that illustrate the kinds of user benefits they might provide.

Overview of iLumina Metadata

Metadata descriptions can range from very informal notes, such as readers’ opinions of books on Amazon.com, to the highly authoritative and standardized cataloging descriptions created by publishers and cataloging librarians [Dempsey and Heery 1998; Gilliland-Swetland, 1998]. The metadata structure for iLumina’s digital resources permits descriptions at both ends of this spectrum. We have derived iLumina’s metadata from the IMS metadata specifications[2], one of several areas where the consortium is developing specifications [IMS 2000]. Figure 3 presents an example of iLumina metadata describing a Java simulation from the CSTC repository. Figure 4 shows metadata for a much simpler kind of digital resource, residing in the UNCW repository.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
- record xmlns="http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/">
+ metametadata
- general
titleApplets for Teaching Computer Graphics Concepts</title
descriptionThese java applets allow students to explore Bezier curves, 2D transformations operations, lighting models and 3D viewing operations.</description
keywordsbezier_curves transformations lighting_model computer_graphics</keywords
</general
+ lifecycle
- technical
formatapplication/x-java</format
locationhttp://www.cstc.org/data/resources/47/</location
- requirements
typeBrowser</type
nameMicrosoft Internet Explorer</name
minimumversion3.0</minimumversion
</requirements
otherplatformrequirementsJava Virtual Machine 1.1 or higher</otherplatformrequirements
</technical
- educational
learningresourcetypeSimulation</learningresourcetype
learningcontextUndergraduate Lower-Division</learningcontext
languageen-US</language
</educational
+ rights
+ relation
+ annotation
- classification
purposeDiscipline</purpose
- taxonpath
sourceACM Computing Classification System</source
- taxon
idI</id
entryComputer Methodologies</entry
</taxon
- taxon
id3</id
entryComputer Graphics</entry
</taxon
</taxonpath
</classification
</record

Figure 3—iLumina metadata for a Java simulation resource in the CSTC repository.

Metadata are represented in XML, with elements from five of the main categories of metadata – metametadata, lifecycle, rights, relation and annotation – collapsed; and ones from general, technical, educational and classification categories fully expanded.

Both examples illustrate the structured nature of IMS metadata, which is organized at the top level into nine metadata categories—metametadata, general, lifecycle, technical, educational, rights, relation, annotation and classification. Each category focuses on distinct features of an element, from how it is constructed, to what it is about, to who owns the resource and what rights end-users hold. Within each category, elements can be hierarchically organized, permitting resources to be described not only in broad categorical terms, but also in great detail.