A survey on the importance of learning object metadata for relevance judgment

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate university students’ perceptions about the usefulness - importance of learning object metadata elements of the UK LOM Core application profile when judging the relevance of learning objects. In order to address this objective an online questionnaire survey was conducted among university students using a clustered sampling technique. A total of 252 students respondent to the questionnaire. Participants represented different disciplines (for example, from Humanities & Social Sciences to Sciences & Engineering), levels of familiarization with the web and educational level (postgraduates and undergraduates). The results showed that participants preferred content related and educational metadata elements as well as metadata elements about the date and the language of a learning object as opposed to technical metadata elements or metadata elements about the version of the learning object. The conclusions show that these findings can have implications in the design and use of learning object metadata schemas for students in the UK Higher Education.