Learning & Leading Through Technology

LEARNING WITH LRMI

The LRMI is part of a larger effort launched in June 2011 by Schema.org, a consortium involving search engine giants Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex that is working to establish a standard method of tagging webpages across the internet.

Recognizing the Schema.org effort as a prime opportunity to improve online search for instructional materials and lay important groundwork for personalized learning, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invited the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons to spearhead the initiative to create an education-specific extension. The LRMI represents the interests of the education community—both those who produce and curate learning resources, and those who search for them.

With project funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, AEP and Creative Commons began work in June 2011. One of their first actions involved forming an LRMI Technical Working Group of education and metadata experts charged with creating the tagging specifications for learning resources.

The resulting LRMI specification, completed in early
2012, proposed the addition of the following properties
to the Schema.org metadata framework (which
originally included broad categories such as titles,
authors, and publishers):
• Common Core State Standards
• Educational use (such as assignment
or group work)

• Learning resource type (such as presentation or handout)

• Time required Following formal approval by Schema.org in April 2013, the LRMI specification is on track to become the de facto standard metadata schema for learning resources as major search engines begin incorporating the LRMI standards into the way they present search results. That means publishers and content curators will be motivated to use LRMI tagging for their resources to increase their online discoverability.

That’s where the LRMI comes in. The LRMI criteria would allow her to quickly find instructional videos on multiplying fractions that are appropriate for sixth grade students and include multiple-choice quizzes. She can accomplish a process that might have taken an entire planning period before in just a few mouse clicks. The system will even allow her to search for resources that align to specific Common Core State Standards. Eventually, finding materials that align to other standards, including the NETS, may also be possible.

Let the Benefits Begin

Over the past two years, AEP has led educational publishers through a proof-of-concept tagging program, creating a pool of LRMI-tagged resources and documenting best practices. As of April 2013, more than 3,000 resources have been tagged. As the volume of tagged resources grows over time into the tens and hundreds of thousands, the benefits will grow exponentially.

Here are just a few of the benefits that educators asked for in the LRMI survey:

“I would love to be able to search by standard instead of keyword so that the results are more relevant.”

—Colleen Werner, Math Teacher, Ipswich High School,

Ipswich, Massachusetts, USA

“Elementary students benefit from searching listings that have been curated for age level, reading level, and quality.”

—Elaine Caffarelli, Teacher/Librarian, Bethel and Penn-Bernville Elementary Schools, Bethel, Pennsylvania, USA

“Just finding a resource is not enough. We need information about how this resource was used and in what contexts and what other students/ educators think about it.”