The Department of Defense (DoD) and the broader training and educational communities use diverse methods to publish and describe courses, learning activities, and instructional resources. Consequently, there are hundreds of proprietary and unconnected catalog descriptions. Hence, there is a lack of awareness about available learning opportunities, leading to duplications of effort. Building an Enterprise Course Catalog that federates local course catalogs into a single portal is one way of overcoming this challenge.
However, to build an effective Enterprise Course Catalog, a new standard that would harmonize the metadata associated with the learning activities and enable interoperability across the catalog systems is needed.
Today’s digital learning environments feature activities on an ever-growing number of platforms and formats. This diversity, combined with demands for greater interoperability, and advances in artificial intelligence-driven data analytics, has created the need for a more detailed learning content metadata.
The P2881 Learning Metadata Standard addresses the need for a new standard for harmonizing metadata. A working group comprising the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), and DoD stakeholders have been formed for designing the standard.
Metadata from a wider variety of learning paradigms, practices, and modalities, including new types of technologies, can be accommodated in the P2881 standard. Furthermore, the standard is being developed with enterprise-automated systems in mind, establishing a more extensive vocabulary that adds granularity and context to each learning activity.
With P2881, organizations and educators will be able to share the abundance of non-traditional learning materials and content. Besides, it would allow the Enterprise Course Catalog to serve as a common DoD portal for accessing them.
Click here to read the original article published by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative.
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