Formal Metadata and Shared Experiences for Discovering Tools to Adapt Open Educational Resources

In this paper we describe an initiative to provide support for users who need to adapt open education resources (OER). As more learning material becomes freely available online, there is increased interest in finding and reusing materials in new contexts. This re-use may involve tasks such as format conversion, language translation, scenario/example updating, repackaging etc. to ensure that material is suited for its new use. Often, the adaptation is an online, distributed and collaborative effort between colleagues so support is also needed for communication and collaborative aspects. Identifying the available tools or software for these tasks and finding the optimum process to transform material to fit new learning aims or situations is a challenging task for educators, content providers, institutions and commercial companies. A Tool Library, developed as part of the OpenScout project, uses descriptions of tools, software or services in conjunction with informal scenarios discussing the application of tools and social networking support to help users discover ways to reuse and adapt OER. We describe the aims and structure of the Tool Library, including the interested stakeholders, and present a suggested metadata structure to expose information about tools for processing learning material.