Simon  Wilkinson  Director  of  Product  EQUELLA  Content  Pla;orm  

A Shift in the ‘Metadata Conversation’ (what a difference executive mandate can make)

Previous conversation with Editorial: Here are the metadata standards. Now please populate the required fields…Why?...because they are required fields…and this will help with discovery of your content…we think… New Conversation: Our next generation of products will provide rich capabilities around learner analytics and adaptive learning, but the content flowing into them needs to be sufficiently enriched and modularized. Here are the requirements we have identified for content. Cool? …cool. Oh…and here are some supporting technologies to ensure you can enrich content at scale.

A couple of HE product use cases: -  A blind econ student struggling with a elasticity curves is led to less advanced supplemental

content that is accessible and that builds comprehension…then to formative assessment items

that reinforce and record the learning. The student can view his progress towards mastery of

course objectives.

-  A physics professor prepping for next week’s class receives an alert on her phone that 80% of

her students missed an important homework question on velocity. She decides to review that

topic at the start of next class.

Both of these use cases depend on a combination of activity data and content metadata.

Metadata as Necessary Component of Learner Insights but not sufficient

The level of insight without availability of content metadata: -  A blind econ student struggling with a elasticity curves is led to supplemental content that is

accessible and that builds comprehension…then to formative assessment items reinforce and

record the learning. The student can view progress towards mastery of course objectives.

-  A physics professor prepping for next week’s class receives an alert on her phone that 80% of

her students missed an important homework question on velocity. She decides to review that

topic at the start of next class.

Message to my stakeholders: If content is not “efficacy enabled”, our next-gen products cannot deliver efficacy analytics and adaptive learning.

Metadata as Necessary Component of Learner Insights