D7.3.5

=Staff are provided with support resources (including training, guidelines and examples) on creating metadata. =

Evidence
Finding resources using the internet should be made easy. This can be aided by developing metadata standards for discovery across domains, by defining frameworks for interoperability, and by facilitating the development of community specific metadata sets that are consistent with this (Bianco et al. 2004).

Resources
Milne & White (2005) collect together twenty-three sets of e-learning quality guidelines from an array of geographical regions. Such guidelines, or something like them, should be part of the support offered to staff by their organizations. Staff need guidelines, and examples of good practice.

Teaching staff should be provided with training and support in the creation and reuse of resources as well as incentives to both create reusable resources in the first place as well as enable reuse.

There are different approaches to metadata. Given that most reuse is going to be intra-institutional then simple metadata and a simple database can be used. This reduces time taken to develop learning resources while still recording sufficient metadata for within institution reuse (Wright et al. 2009).

There is also a large metadata initiative: Dublin Core dedicated to promoting the adoption of interoperable metadata standards. Dublin Core Metadata defines 15 optional elements to describe digital materials on the web: Title, creator, subject, description, publisher, contributor, date, type, format, identifier, source, language, relation, coverage, rights. http://dublincore.org/schemas/