Towards Community-Based Open Educational Resources: Tools for Developing and Managing IEEE LOM Application Profiles

Abstract

A number of international initiatives, such as the leading initiative of Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, have recognized the potential value of sharing and reusing digital resources among educational communities. As a result – organizing, managing, offering, and accessing these resources over the Web have been key issues for both the research and the educational community. Within this framework, a popular way for describing digital educational resources is the IEEE Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) Standard. On the other hand, it has also been recognized that it is not possible for a generic standard such as IEEE LOM to fully meet the specific requirements and thoroughly accommodate the particular needs of different educational communities. Therefore, the practice of generating Application Profiles (APs) of the IEEE LOM has emerged and some tools for facilitating this process have been developed. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of existing tools for developing and managing IEEE LOM APs and compare them, so as to identify their strengths and weaknesses.