Educators look all the time for "learning resources" to use in their classrooms. These can be books; often they are. Up until now, that "discovery" process has generally taken place as a sales interaction. K-12 publishers have sales reps and catalogs and introduce their wares to educators through schools and districts. Teachers can try to identify learning resources through conventional web search, but they often don't find what they're looking for. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) has set out to fix this problem. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the LRMI has proposed a metadata tagging protocol that could help teachers find resources more easily on the web. The LRMI proposal has been submitted as an extension to Schema.org, the consortium of Microsoft Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex currently working toward standardizing metadata on the web. A number of publishers have already begun tagging their resources with LRMI metadata as part of a test program. The LRMI will benefit not only educational publishers but trade publishers as well, since it will create a level playing field on the internet for all publishers with educational content who take the trouble to tag it properly. In other words, the LRMI will present trade publishers an opportunity to penetrate the education market -- without a huge new marketing initiative -- with metadata. Neal Goff, who has long experience in both trade and educational publishing and is a past president of the Association of Educational Publishers, will explain the LRMI and talk about what trade publishers ought to be doing to keep their eye on it.

1. www.lrmi.net
The Learning Resources
Metadata Initiative (LRMI)
Presented by Neal Goff,
President, Egremont Associates
Publishers Launch
January 2013

2. www.lrmi.net
What is LRMI?
• Effort to develop unique metadata standards
for educational resources
• Includes properties that educators and
educational publishers have identified as key
for discoverability
 E.g.: Subject area, intended grade level,
alignment with curriculum standards
• Goal is to make it easier for educators and
other interested parties to find learning
resources to meet specific student and class
needs

3. www.lrmi.net
What problem does it solve?
• Educational publishing does not have agreed-
upon metadata standards (e.g., nothing
comparable to BISAC)
• The proliferation of digital materials makes
discoverability even more challenging than it’s
traditionally been
• The increased availability of free educational
resources on the Web raises the priority for
educational publishers to have their
copyrighted materials easily discoverable

4. www.lrmi.net
Who is behind LRMI?
• Leadership
 The Association of Educational Publishers
 Creative Commons
• Funding sources
 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
 William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• Buy-in from the major search engines
 LRMI extends Schema.org microdata markup
conventions recognized by Bing, Google, Yahoo!
and Yandex

5. www.lrmi.net
If it works…
• Educational resources will be easier to find
• Structured browsing and linking of resources
will happen more easily
- Within collections
- Between collections
• It will be easier to align resources with
curricula and standards
LRMI is not intended to supplant schemas already in
use, but to work with existing metadata

6. www.lrmi.net
6
The LRMI Properties v1
(lrmi.net/the-specification)
General Terms:
• Title/name
• URL
• Description
• Image
• Topic
• Created (date)
• Creator
THE TOWER OF BABEL, PIETER BRUEGEL, 1563
• Publisher
• inLanguage
• Mediatype
• TechnologiesRequired
• TechnologiesRecommended
• Use RightsURL
• Is based on

7. The LRMI Properties v1 (cont’d)
(lrmi.net/the-specification)
• Educational Terms:
– IntendedEndUserRole
– EducationalUse
– TimeRequired
– TypicalAgeRange
– InteractivityType
– LearningResourceType
• Competency related:
– EducationalAlignment
– Description
– URL
– AlignmentType
– EducationalFramework
– TargetDescription
– TargetName
– TargetURL

8. www.lrmi.net
8
Recommended values for one element
 Activity
 Audio
 Broadcast
 Calculator
 Discussion
 E-Mail
 Field Trip
 Hands-on
 In-Person/Speaker
 Kinesthetic
 Lab Material
 Manipulative
 MBL
 Model
 On-Line
 Podcast
Presentation
 Printed
 Robotics
 Still Image
 Video
 Wiki
 Worksheet
 Lesson Plan
 Test
 Quiz
• Learning resource type:

9. www.lrmi.net
9
• To prove that it can work, the organizers needed to
see what it would take for publishers to begin
tagging to the LRMI
• Early participants in the tagging process included:
 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
 McGraw-Hill
 Pearson
 Better Lesson
 CK-12
• 22 publishers are now actively participating
• 3,000+ resources tagged by end of February
Proof of Concept

10. www.lrmi.net
10
Proof of Concept: Next Steps
• Continue to tag resources from publishers
• Document best-practice tagging steps
 Publisher implementation guides in
development – target release in February
• Generate recommendations for
features/functions of next-generation tagging
tools
• Create service providers kit with defined
services
• Increase number of participating publishers
• Shift from doing tagging to support publishers
tagging

11. www.lrmi.net
If you’d like to play…
• Go to lrmi.net and sign up for the mailing list
• Join the LRMI Google Group:
groups.google.com/group/lrmi
• Keep an eye out for LRMI sessions at Tools of
Change, SXSWedu, ISTE
• Follow LRMI discussion on Twitter: #LRMI
• Contact AEP’s LRMI Project Manager, Dave
Gladney, at dgladney@AEPweb.org