Paradata (learning resource analytics)

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As a general definition, paradata are usage data about learning resources that include not just quantitative metrics (e.g., how many times a piece of content was accessed), but also pedagogic context, as inferred through the actions of educators and learners. Paradata may be operationalized as a specific type of metadata, however the construct differs from traditional descriptive metadata that classify the properties of the learning resource itself, and instead involves the capture—and open resharing—of in situ information about online users’ actions related to the resource. [1] Learning resource paradata is generated through user processes of searching for content, identifying interest for subsequent use, correlating resources to specific learning goals or standards, and integrating content into educational practices. Paradata may include individual or aggregate user interactions such as viewing, downloading, sharing to other users, favoriting, and embedding reusable content into derivative works, as well as contextualizing activities such as aligning content to educational standards, adding tags, and incorporating resources into curriculum. Context about users is also of interest as paradata, including grade level or subject taught, experience level, or geographic location—as is information about the curricular relevance, audience, methodologies, and instructional settings of use as a resource is adopted by practitioners. Paradata are generally anonymized and/or aggregated at the community level to protect the privacy of individual users as data are shared between learning communities. Paradata may be expressed in realtime data streaming as user actions occur, or as periodic reporting of user activities over a range of time. [2]

Contents

Related concepts include Contextualized Attention Metadata, [3] activity streams, tagging and other social metadata, [4] and user annotations.

History

In 2010, the term paradata was adopted by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) [5] to reference data about user interactions with digital learning objects within the NSDL’s STEM Exchange initiative. [6] The construct has since been adopted by other organizations engaged in digital library and digital learning resource projects including the Learning Registry [7] initiative spearheaded by the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education [8] and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative at the Department of Defense. [9]

Technical Frameworks for Sharing Learning Resource Paradata

In February 2011, NSDL released an open source XML paradata framework versioned as NSDL comm_para1.0, [10] the structure of which parallels similar schemas for metadata so that it can interoperate with Dublin Core based schemas including nsdl-dc. [11]

In October, 2011 the Learning Registry development team released its Paradata Specification V1.0 [ [12] that details the schemata of JSON objects for representing learning resource paradata. In 2016 the US Dept of Ed and others published a spec for various companies to push their paradata to the Learning Registry. [13] That would mean various resource libraries could aggregate data on educational resources in one place. As an example, OpenEd, Google, Microsoft and others would push data on how many times an educational video was used by teachers, to help rank them by popularity.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dublin Core</span> Standardized set of metadata elements

The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen main metadata items for describing digital or physical resources. It was the first metadata standard for describing web content. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is responsible for formulating the Dublin Core; DCMI is a project of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), a non-profit organization.

A learning object is "a collection of content items, practice items, and assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective". The term is credited to Wayne Hodgins, and dates from a working group in 1994 bearing the name. The concept encompassed by 'Learning Objects' is known by numerous other terms, including: content objects, chunks, educational objects, information objects, intelligent objects, knowledge bits, knowledge objects, learning components, media objects, reusable curriculum components, nuggets, reusable information objects, reusable learning objects, testable reusable units of cognition, training components, and units of learning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Archives Initiative</span> Informal organisation

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata). The group got together in the late late 1990s and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and ResourceSync. All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content to allow people harvest metadata. Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Science Digital Library</span>

National Science Digital Library (NSDL) of the United States is an open-access online digital library and collaborative network of disciplinary and grade-level focused education providers operated by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. NSDL's mission is to provide quality digital learning collections to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, both formal and informal, institutional and individual. NSDL's collections are refined by a network of STEM educational and disciplinary professionals. Their work is based on user data, disciplinary knowledge, and participation in the evolution of digital resources as major elements of effective STEM learning.

MARC is a standard set of digital formats for the machine-readable description of items catalogued by libraries, such as books, DVDs, and digital resources. Computerized library catalogs and library management software need to structure their catalog records as per an industry-wide standard, which is MARC, so that bibliographic information can be shared freely between computers. The structure of bibliographic records almost universally follows the MARC standard. Other standards work in conjunction with MARC, for example, Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR)/Resource Description and Access (RDA) provide guidelines on formulating bibliographic data into the MARC record structure, while the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) provides guidelines for displaying MARC records in a standard, human-readable form.

The PBCore metadata standard was created by the public broadcasting community in the United States of America for use by public broadcasters and related communities that manage audiovisual assets, including libraries, archives, independent producers, etc. PBCore is organized as a set of specified fields that can be used in database applications, and it can be used as a data model for media cataloging and asset management systems. As an XML schema, PBCore enables data exchange between media collections, systems and organizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Learning object metadata</span> Data model

Learning Object Metadata is a data model, usually encoded in XML, used to describe a learning object and similar digital resources used to support learning. The purpose of learning object metadata is to support the reusability of learning objects, to aid discoverability, and to facilitate their interoperability, usually in the context of online learning management systems (LMS).

The Department of Defense Discovery Metadata Specification is a Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) metadata initiative. DDMS is loosely based on the Dublin Core vocabulary. DDMS defines discovery metadata elements for resources posted to community and organizational shared spaces. It is sometimes (incorrectly) referred to as DoD Discovery Metadata Standard. The project focuses both on the process of developing a central taxonomy for metadata, and defining a way of discovering resources by their metadata using that taxonomy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metadata management</span> Managing metadata about content data in digital media

Metadata management involves managing metadata about other data, whereby this "other data" is generally referred to as content data. The term is used most often in relation to digital media, but older forms of metadata are catalogs, dictionaries, and taxonomies. For example, the Dewey Decimal Classification is a metadata management system developed in 1876 for libraries.

Digital Item is the basic unit of transaction in the MPEG-21 framework. It is a structured digital object, including a standard representation, identification and metadata.

Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.

Preservation metadata is item level information that describes the context and structure of a digital object. It provides background details pertaining to a digital object's provenance, authenticity, and environment. Preservation metadata, is a specific type of metadata that works to maintain a digital object's viability while ensuring continued access by providing contextual information, usage details, and rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metadata</span> Data about data

Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:

A metadata standard is a requirement which is intended to establish a common understanding of the meaning or semantics of the data, to ensure correct and proper use and interpretation of the data by its owners and users. To achieve this common understanding, a number of characteristics, or attributes of the data have to be defined, also known as metadata.

The Handle System is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives's proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources".

The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) for the Internet, computing, and computer science, is a specification that defines a set of XML metadata vocabularies for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing content.

ISO/IEC 19788Information technology – Learning, education and training – Metadata for learning resources is a multi-part standard prepared by subcommittee SC 36 of the joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information Technology for Learning, Education and Training.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OER Commons</span> Freely accessible online library

OER Commons is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.

Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) is an XML schema for describing museum or collection objects. Memory institutions use LIDO for “exposing, sharing and connecting data on the web”. It can be applied to all kind of disciplines in cultural heritage, e.g. art, natural history, technology, etc. LIDO is a specific application of CIDOC CRM.

References

  1. ↑ "What Is Paradata?". NSDL/UCAR.
  2. ↑ "Paradata in 20 Minutes or Less". Learning Registry.
  3. ↑ Najjar, Jehad; Martin Wolpers; Eric Duval (September–October 2007). "Contextualized Attention Metadata: Personalized Access to Digital Resources". D-Lib Magazine. 13 (9/10). doi: 10.1045/september2007-wolpers .
  4. ↑ Smith-Yoshimura, Karen; Cyndi Shein (September 2011). Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives and Museums Part 1: Site Reviews (PDF). OCLC Research.
  5. ↑ "National Science Digital Library". NSDL/UCAR. Archived from the original on 2011-01-17. Retrieved 2020-04-30.
  6. ↑ "STEM Exchange". NSDL/UCAR.
  7. ↑ "Learning Registry".
  8. ↑ "Office of Educational Technology".
  9. ↑ "Advanced Distributed Learning".
  10. ↑ "NSDL Comm_Para 1.00 Specification". NSDL/UCAR.
  11. ↑ "Contributing Paradata (Usage Data) to NSDL". NSDL/UCAR.
  12. ↑ "Learning Registry Paradata Specification V1.0". Learning Registry.
  13. ↑ "Deprecated – This Code Base is No Longer Maintained". GitHub . 15 March 2019.
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