Abstract:
Despite ongoing research on learning repositories, share and reuse of Teacher Education (TE) resources remains scarce. One of the reasons is that TE communities use their own in-house resources and repositories in a rather isolated way, thus limiting resource exchange in different contexts. Further, current learning metadata specifications such as Dublin Core (DC) and LOM do not address the description of pedagogical characteristics of resources demanded by TE practitioners. To overcome these limitations, the Share.TEC project aims to provide a federated TE metadata repository based on the Common Metadata Model (CMM) as the shared reference metadata model. Key for the success of the Share.TEC project is the migration of existing TE metadata records to the federated repository, performing the necessary format conversions to CMM. Besides, practitioners should be able to make TE-based annotations of resources. These two functionalities are covered by the Metadata Migration and Annotation Tool of Teacher Education Resources (MATTER) that is the subject of this paper. Although MATTER is purposed for the Share.TEC project, it can be potentially used to support the federation of other learning repositories.