Enriching ELIXIER, the pool of resources, with metadata concerning externally generated teaching and learning materials and free-licence media (OER)

Project description

ELIXIER is a pool of resources shared by education servers from the federal states and the German Education Server, which in November 2014 contained references to more than 50,000 digital educational media. By starting a filtered search for specific licences (particularly according to Creative Commons-(cc) standard), users were able to target Open Educational Resources (OER), across school subjects 5,000 OER could be found.

The above mentioned pool could be nearly doubled by integrating collections of material from the community portal and social bookmarking system Edutags – especially regarding relevant and quality-assured sources, e.g. Lehrer-Online, the centre for teaching media – Zentrale für Unterrichtsmedien (ZUM) or the OER community portal Serlo. Other pools could also be tapped, e.g. from Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung or the EU-funded project Intergeo. However, these additional resources were indexed heterogeneously and needed to be standardised to ELIXIER. In particular, this concerned allocation to systematic pathways (school subjects and lesson topics), which were used by editors from the state education servers to compile materials for curricular and instructional purposes.

While concordancies have already been built at general and vocational education school levels for the systematic categorisations applied by the German Education Server and Datenbank Bildungsmedien (DaBi) offered by the School Media Institute (Institut für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, FWU) and ELIXIER, systematic structures of the Education Server and DaBi needed to be adapted regarding deep hierarchy levels in the fine-grained ELIXIER system. To this end, the so-called synonym manager was to be reused. This mapping tool was developed in the context of the Edutags project, and it was to be further developed so suggestions for mapping materials from the sources listed can be deduced from the indexes regarding allocation to systematic pathways in ELIXIER.

Funding

This was an innovative project run by the German Education Server, sourced from the institutional budget.

Co-operations

FWU – Institut für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht

Project Team

Project Details