Integrating Digital Library Resources into Online Courses

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

This Targeted Research project is investigating a model for integrating content from NSDL into online and web-enhanced courses in higher education. The project's first user community and testbed are the students and faculty at the Texas A&M Electronic Teachers College (ETC). CollegisEduprise is supplying its iLumina digital library infrastructure and its experience with metadata tagging of learning resources to facilitate the integration of Texas A&M University System learning objects into the NSDL. Services under development include mapping of modular learning object content to teacher certification competencies in high area needs such as mathematics; defining competency-based metadata vocabularies for these learning objects that reflects the teacher certification requirements; and creating a Content-Packaging Tool Suite to enable faculty to select learning objects from a repository, build them into learning modules, and connect them into course-management systems or other delivery platforms. These services are being designed and implemented in a generalizable way to enable effective integration into the NSDL and sharing with others who want competency-tagged learning materials and tools to construct learning modules from them.