The Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO) work attempts to harmonise different metadata specifications around Europe for describing and exchanging information about courses, e-learning offerings, and learning opportunities.
This project was initiated by Norway and had its basis in the Norwegian CDM (Course Description Metadata) work. The CDM specification has been adopted by French universities with some modifications in a project co-ordinated by the French Ministry of Education. In Sweden they used EMIL (Education Information Markup Language), in Germany DIN published (December 2006) the specification PAS 1068 developed in consensus by its DIN-workshop, and the UK had developed XCRI (eXchanging Course-Related Information) into a much used service. In 2004 a project was proposed by the CEN/ISSS WS-LT for harmonisation of the existing specifications and to identify needs and use cases by other countries. As a number of experts and national interests found this a serious market demand, a group of experts in the field set out to do this work on a voluntary unpaid basis.
MLO-Advertising (MLO-AD) is essentially a standard capturing metadata that is needed for advertising learning opportunities. It is about providing information about courses, and learning opportunities in most cases these would be courses offered by universities. In is anticipated that in future the MLO set of standards will be further developed to describe Metadata for Learning Opportunities related to the Europass system used throughout Europe.
What are the benefits?
For the European community – there are many – there is a more effective way for course providers to advertise their course and for the learner to pick and choose from a range of available courses, it’s easy to locate information of similar courses and could be the impetus for the emergence of specialised brokering services.
The application of a similar metadata schema to describe Australian university and VET courses would provide many benefits. For example one would be able to compare search results for particular courses based on location, duration and other institutional benefits. VET providers could benefit from being able to advertise their courses more widely and in a more effective manner.
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