For Educators / Learners
The scenarios are many—an educator compiling a syllabus or lesson plan, a student looking for a piece of information to complete a homework assignment, or a Ph.D. candidate conducting research for their thesis—but the outcome is often the same. In the current landscape of online search, individuals seeking educational content are spending far too much time sorting through pages and pages of content without satisfactory results.
This is the main problem LRMI sets out to address.
If all educational content—or at least a critical mass—is described in a consistent and uniform manner, web searches will return more relevant results, and it will become easier for search engines to provide filters by which users can narrow down results even more precisely.
Click here to see an example of how search engines are already applying this concept in the food industry. You’ll notice in the lefthand column the ability to narrow your search results based on cook time, ingredients, and calories. You may have also experienced this while shopping online.
It is the goal of the LRMI to define the parameters by which users might search and filter learning resources online—in other words, to decide what shows up in the lefthand column when you do a search for “math book.” Once the LRMI framework is published*, users will be able to narrow search results according to things like subject area, grade level, teacher resource, standards alignment, etc.**
Educational content, however, is a bit more complicated than recipes or shopping. That’s why we’ve convened a Technical Working Group of experts in the fields of metadata and education, and an Advisory Group of open educational resources organizations and educational media publishers (textbooks, software, services).
We’re also counting on you, the user who will be doing the searching, to inform our work and tell us what you need. Please visit the LRMI Discussion Forum and give us your feedback and guidance.
* This presumes adoption by the search vendors and implementation by publishers of educational content and learning resources—neither of which are guaranteed.
** These terms are listed as examples. The actual tags that will be included in the LRMI framework have not been determined yet.