People have many ideas of standards, and sometimes it is mistakenly thought that a standard like Learning Object Metadata (LOMv1.0), attempts to standardise the content of learning material. This is not the case, on the contrary, the metadata is data about the content itself, i.e. describing what's in there.

Metadata is like an ingredients label on the side of a cereal box. So, the effort to standardise metadata means that the ingredients label is supposed to displayed certain things in a certain way, like who is the producer, the date the content was produced, the copyright, and so on. People still remain free to produce the content the way they want, i.e. editorial independence remains intact.

Who uses metadata then? Maybe most of us think that metadata users are those boring looking librarians, you know the ones that catalogue all the index cards in a library in the neat looking boxes? Well, they still keep doing that work, nowadays digitally, but also teachers, publishing houses, government agencies, corporations, and other organisations involved in education and training produce metadata about the digital learning content to make it available for a larger audience.

When you think about it, it makes more sense. Let's take a teacher who puts the course material on the internet for pupils, and also for other interested audiences. Someone might be interested in reusing that material, if it was clearly stated that it is copyright free, and so on. The key here lies in the fact that reusing learning material, partly or entirely, helps saving time, efforts, and also money for all players on the field. That is why it makes sense. And if you look at it from the corporate, marketing point of view, you can understand why the corporate world loves metadata standards, and they shout "hurray" for the first Standard of LOM

You can also check it out for yourself at http://etb.jrc.it! There is a new service for all the teachers to find reusable learning material on the web. ETB is a search engine that bases its search on the metadata, that is why it is so much more efficient than some other search systems desinged for digital learning resources. Just try it to see the difference. And if you are interested in what lies behind, you can always read more on the website at http://etb.eun.org.

More information about the standardisation work on the learning technologies:

Europe: Learning Technologies Workshop under CEN/ISSS
http://www.cenorm.be/isss/Workshop/lt/

International: IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC)
http://ltsc.ieee.org/