scope:

This report focuses on application profiles of learning resource/object metadata for rural and agricultural education. This covers both learning resources that are covering agricultural topics in specific, as well as more generic life science and other topics that are relevant for rural and agricultural learners. Efforts in the development of methodologies, standards and application development in the domains of rural and agricultural education are at present widely dispersed. The amount of digitally available information is growing exponentially and appropriate steps need to be undertaken to facilitate sharing and consequently reduce efforts and costs. These information resources are often located in proprietary applications and use dissimilar data models, which hampers information sharing. Additionally, information system designers are sometimes unaware of existing design methodologies, data description standards, freely available tools and applications. Learning Technology (LT) specifications and standards have not yet been widely adopted and implemented. Few initiatives have reported implementing some of them - more often to describe learning resources using some metadata standard such as IEEE LOM and Dublin Core (DC), and less often for sequencing them (e.g. SCORM). In this direction, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, has recently supported the launch of an Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force (AgLR-TF, http://aglr.aua.gr). This community of experts working on learning resources related to rural and agricultural populations, has been collecting, reviewing, and studying implemented metadata application profiles (APs) in AgLRs around the world and trying to elaborate mappings among them.