Enhancing the quality of LIS education in Asia

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to describe continuing effort to develop a repository of teaching materials for sharing and reuse in library and information science (LIS) schools in Asia. It also aims to propose a framework for carrying out a user study to validate the taxonomy and metadata, and evaluate how they support the reuse of teaching materials in four Asian countries.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a combination of approaches. The first phase focuses on building a repository of learning materials powered by taxonomy and metadata with enhanced searching and browsing capabilities. The second phase uses different evaluation techniques to propose a framework for assessing the usability of learning materials.FindingsThe potential for reuse of teaching materials in the area of information organization is examined by analyzing how various aspects of this topic are covered in three Master's programs in Information Studies, Knowledge Management, and Information Systems at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A faceted taxonomy has been helpful in tagging different types of learning objects. A metadata scheme based on DC‐Education and LOM has been used for enhanced description of learning materials.Originality/valueThis paper makes contributions in several ways. It suggests guidelines for developing taxonomies in different domains; describes steps in building repositories of learning materials; and suggests a methodology for studying reusability of learning material.