DC-Ed Element Proposal: Instructional Method

Title: Working Group Term Proposal: Instructional Method
Creator: Dublin Core Education Working Group
Date Issued: 2004/8/28
Identifier: http://www.ischool.washington.edu/sasutton/8-28-04/
Replaces: http://www.ischool.washington.edu/sasutton/8-21-04/
Is Replaced By: None
Latest Version: http://www.ischool.washington.edu/sasutton/8-28-04/
Status of Document: Proposal to the DCMI Usage Board
Description of Document: This document presents a proposal from the Dublin Core Education Working Group for a new element named "instructionalMethod"

Proposal

Name: http://purl.org/dc/terms/instructionalMethod
Label: Instructional Method
Definition: Processes by which knowledge, attitudes and skills are deliberately engendered and assessed.
Comment: This element describes ways of presenting instructional materials or conducting instructional activities, patterns of learner-to-learner and learner-to-instructor interactions, and mechanisms by which group and individual levels of learning are measured. Instructional methods include all aspects of the instruction and learning processes from planning and implementation through evaluation and feedback.
Examples:

Resource relies on "brainstorming":

"Resource includes group brainstorming activities that encourage the creative generation of ideas in which group members contribute suggestions in a spontaneous, noncritical manner."

Note: Where a controlled vocabulary of instructional method terms is available, value URIs may be used. (E.g., http://purl.org/gem/instance/GEM-TM/#Brainstorming)

Resource supports "discovery learning":

"Resource provides a learning situation in which the principal content of what is to be learned is not given but must be independently discovered by the learner."

Note: Where a controlled vocabulary of instructional method terms is available, value URIs may be used. (E.g., http://purl.org/gem/instance/GEM-TM/#DiscoveryLearning)

Resource provides for "peer assessment":

"Resource provides for peer evaluation."

Note: Where a controlled vocabulary of instructional method terms is available, value URIs may be used. (E.g., http://purl.org/gem/instance/GEM-AM/#PeerEvaluation)

Resource provides for "individualized instruction":

"Instruction can be adapted to meet individual needs within the group of students."

Note: Where a controlled vocabulary of instructional method terms is available, value URIs may be used. (E.g., http://purl.org/gem/instance/GEM-GRO/#IndividualizedInstruction)

Type of term: Element
Term qualified: None
Why needed: Frequently, statements about the instructional methods used with an educational resource are a primary means of separating one resource from another and provide the end-user with a means of selecting resources to retrieve that more closely meet the needs of specific educational contexts and goals.

Not all educational resources are designed with specific teaching and learning methods in mind. For example, learning objects intended for reuse in varying contexts may be devoid of explicit methods of use. In such cases, best practice dictates that no information be recorded in the instructionalMethod element. Best practice also suggests the development and deployment of controlled vocabularies for the instructionalMethod element to support the needs of specific groups within the larger teaching and learning community. However, the recommendation of any specific volcabulary or set of vocabularies for the instructionalMethod element is beyond the scope of this proposal.

Working Group/community support: The notion of being able to capture metadata statements about the learning processes and techniques has been before the Working Group since before its face-to-face meeting in Melbourne (Kattemingga Lodge) in February 2000. [For a summary of the Kattemingga meeing, see http://www.ischool.washington.edu/sasutton/dc-ed-f2f/] Since 2000, DC-based applications in the education and training domain have continued to develop local elements and vocabularies to record statements of these sorts.

For discussion of the proposed element, see the following postings from the DC-Ed Working Group list (as well as others) relate to the proposal:

Proposed status: Conforming
Related DCMI terms: None
Related non-DCMI terms: There is no IEEE LOM element that provides for holding statements of the sort held by the proposed element. While an undifferentiated description of an instructional method might be assigned to IEEE LOM 5.10:Educational.Description, use of the element is not recommended because of its "catch all" purpose within the LOM. Note that the CanCore best practices guide "... does not recommend the use of this element [5.10:Educational.Description] for the purposes of interoperation in distributed environments." (Canadian Core Learning Resource Metadata Application Profile. Available at: http://www.cancore.ca/documents.html)
Impact on applications: None. Since current DC-based applications provide no conflicting means of making such metadata statement, impact on those applications would be obviously minimal. Some applications store such information as an undifferentiated part of dc:description. Again, the impact of this new term would be minimal on such applications.
About the proposers: The term is proposed by the Dublin Core Education Working Group. The Working Group has been charged with proposing new element and element refinements that serve the needs of the education and training communities.

Records of the activity of the DC-Education Working Group are available in the mailing list archives.