As you may recall, the LRMI project is creating a educational metadata vocabulary that will hopefully plug into the Schema.org metadata framework to be used by the major search engines.

Last week, the LRMI Technical Working Group released version 0.7 of the LRMI specification and with it, began the last public comment period ending January 31st. Barring any issues that need to be addressed, this will be the version that is submitted to the Schema.org community for review and inclusion.

Please provide any input on the LRMI mailing list or on the web forum at LRMI.net.

The Learning Resources Metadata Initiative (LRMI) Technical Working Group just released the latest draft of their specification. This version is another step on the road to the final public release and submission to Schema.org, the multiple search engine group that is maintaining a standard metadata specification for online content. LRMI intends to extend Schema.org’s documentation to include metadata that is important to the educational community; everyone from commercial publishers and OER producers to learners of all varieties (and of course, educators).

Please explore the 0.5 version of the specification and provide any feedback via the LRMI mailing list by December 9th.

The LRMI Technical Working Group membership is:

• Sheryl Abshire, Calcasieu Parish Public School System
• Phil Barker, JISC CETIS
• Dan Brickley, VU University Amsterdam
• Brian Carver, UC Berkeley School of Information
• Cable Green, Creative Commons
• Greg Grossmeier, Creative Commons (Co-Chair)
• Charlie Jiang, Microsoft
• Michael Johnson, Full Potential Associates
• Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons (Co-Chair)
• Joshua Marks, Curriki
• Brandt Redd, Gates Foundation
• Colin Smythe, IMS Global
• Stuart Sutton, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
• Randy Wilhelm, netTrekker
• Lee Wilson, PCI Educational Publishing

The first meeting of the Working Group will be a teleconference this Wednesday (August 17th). To follow along with the progress of the group, there is a public timeline and mailing list that anyone can join.

Some of the details on my Moleskine by Kim Joar / CC BY

The great promise of Open Educational Resources (OER) to provide access to high quality learning materials is limited by the discoverability of those resources and the difficulty of targeting them to the needs of specific learners. Creating a common metadata schema will accelerate movement toward personalized learning by publishers, content providers and learners, and help to unleash the tremendous potential of OER and online learning.

From AEP’s press release:

“This is a watershed project for our industry. It benefits both users and content providers because improved discoverability expands the market,” said Charlene Gaynor, CEO of AEP. “Being part of the process allows publishers to address issues such as quality and suitability as dimensions of educational content.”

CC is co-leading the LRMI with the Association of Educational Publishers, which includes publishers such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education, Scholastic, Inc. and Pearson. Open education organizations in addition to CC also support the project, including the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISMKE), Curriki.org, BetterLesson.org, and the Monterey Institute for Technology (MITE).

To learn more about the timeliness and impact of the LRMI, CC’s role in the project, and what this means for OER and online education publishers, grantees of the U.S. Department of Labor’s $2 billion TAACCCT program, other CC-using publishers and platforms, and technologists, please see our LRMI FAQ.

You can keep up to date and contribute to the broader conversation by following http://creativecommons.org/tag/lrmi and using the tag #lrmi on social media. If you want to get involved, join the LRMI list at http://groups.google.com/group/lrmi and introduce yourself. We look forward to your contributions!