The Use of Metadata in Open Educational Resources Repositories: An Exploratory Study

Context: Open Educational Resources (OERs) are free and open materials to support teaching and learning. Generally, OERs are stored in digital repositories and use metadata to describe their content. Because of factors such as dissemination and use of resources, the OER repository collections are increasing rapidly, along with your metadata. However, the metadata is not yet a correctly and frequently used by users, generating several problems finding and retrieving OER. Objective: Considering this scenario, we intend to identify how metadata are being used in the context of OER and what are its implications for finding resources in OER repositories. Method: For this, we conducted an exploratory study across a robust data set composed of 1,243,938 metadata. This data set was build with web crawlers that automatically extracted and organized the data into spreadsheets. Results: Through our research, we identified the main challenges of metadata used in OER context, the impact in the search engines, and identified the key standards and values adopted. Conclusion: Among the most common issues detected we highlight the problem of standardization of metadata values, the lack of presentation of relevant data, the low utilization of metadata during retrieve operation by search engines.