Metadata for smart multimedia learning objects

Abstract

The application of educational metadata is nowadays often limited to the description of static resources (text or image) in order to support the retrieval process. The usage of metadata is done in a static way with respect to the (static) content and cannot influence multimedia content itself. An adequate description of dynamic multimedia content, for example animations, is also difficult. In this paper we propose dynamic educational metadata as an extension of IEEE's Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) to describe multimedia content. These metadata can be used to customize the behavior of the multimedia object according to the user's needs. The term customization is normally used in the context of component software technology and applied in our context to denote changes and/or modifications to a multimedia learning object. These changes are necessary to match the learning goals of a user and to reuse dynamic multimedia content in a different context.