Issues of designing educational multimedia metadata set based on educational features and needs

The sharable and reusable multimedia learning objects are very important to avoid repeated efforts among users. LOM-like standards have been widely used to support resource managements and applications. This paper describes the differences between LOM-like standards and educational needs of multimedia learning objects. We classify multimedia learning object types based on educational features and needs, and explain the differences between multimedia and single media learning objects. Existing LOM-like standards lack educational feature descriptions about educational needs, are not easy to retrieve middle-level (e.g., abstract) and high-level (e.g., pedagogy and context) semantics from multimedia learning objects. In order to make existing LOM-like standards and technologies really benefit the teachers, this paper summarizes the issues of designing metadata content structure for storing educational multimedia resources.