Providing culturally contextualized metadata to promote sharing and reuse of learning objects

Abstract

This paper presents some proposals to formalize the creation of Learning Objects (LO) that define rules concerned to the content organization and/or the set of metadata used to describe and to document the LOs. This paper presents Cognitor (COGNItive strategies-based EdiTOR), a common-sense aided framework for a certain Pattern Language that aims to help educators create and contextualize e-Learning content as hyper documents, considering cognitive, pedagogical and cultural issues, packaging the LOs according to SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard, the most known and probably most used standard for LO creation. The LOs created by Cognitor are intended to be easy to share and reuse, mainly because Cognitor helps editors fill out the LO metadata using concepts that are culturally contextualized on the main target learner's culture through suggestions coming from a common sense knowledge base that are used to support filling in specific metadata fields.