Gaps between Metadata Standards of Learning Objects and Educational Needs of Multimedia Learning Resources

Multimedia learning resources have diverse content forms which can satisfy the educational needs including multimodal resources, multi-sensory teaching, virtual situated-teaching, simulation classroom, emotion interaction, and so on. So, many teachers/developers create multimedia resources for learning, education and training. In order to avoid repeated efforts of teachers/developers, metadata standards could be used for sharing and reusing multimedia learning resources. This paper describes existent metadata standards and their features respectively. The educational features and needs of multimedia learning resources are analyzed. Some educational features are different from single media, such as teachers and learners' emotion, discourse and behavior, and so on. According to these differences, the gaps between metadata standards and educational needs of multimedia learning resources are listed. Existent metadata standards don't fully describe educational features of multimedia learning resources to share and reuse.