Usefulness and ease of use of metadata descriptions for open educational resources

Pedagogical information on open educational resources (OER) enables specific searching and sharing of those materials. The LOM standard suggests fields such as workload, target group and interactivity, among others. Against the background that indexing educational resources with additional metadata is time-consuming and resource-intensive and that creators of OER also want to publish their materials, the questions arise about the added value of the additional information for searching and about the difficulty in creating it. Many German OER retrieval services currently have an editorial team that checks the metadata and advises lecturers on filling in the fields. However, it is often the lecturers themselves who want to upload their materials and describe them with metadata. Against this background we conducted a qualitative study and asked university lecturers about the usefulness and usability of specific pedagogical information on OER. In a second step, they were asked to try to apply this information to their own educational resources. The results show that not all of the proposed pedagogical information is useful for OER in higher education. Relevant metadata for the search are type of learning material, target group, description and prior knowledge. Information on workload and interactivity is less relevant and also more difficult for lecturers to describe. However, the subject-specificity and diversity of the educational resources comes into play in all results, as the lecturer statements show. The results can help providers of OER repositories to select appropriate metadata fields and contribute to further clarification of metadata field value lists.