This section introduces types of strategies that are beneficial once the LO has been stored in the LOR and how easily a user can find, retrieve and re-use a learning object. These types of strategies refers to two types of quality:
- Retrieval Quality, meaning that the user may freely search metadata records in many ways
- Information Quality, which refers to how user's can obtain information on how and in what situations the LO can or has been used as well as techniques and tools that facilitates this type of feedback.
Retrieval Quality
To provide retrieval quality the user should be able to retrieve LO records by:
- Entering free text keywords for search in all metadata fields or in specific ones
- Browsing a known Classifications, Thesaurus,Competency profile or Organizational Typology
- Browsing by Ontologies that links known relationships within a domain
- Using federated search, that is search for a LO in one or many linked repositories
Information Quality
Here we need to think about strategies that will on the one hand provide information to the user about reusability options and on the other hand how users can offer suggestions to improve the LO and how this information can be fed back to the author or designer of the LO.
Display Information Strategies
- Descriptive structured resumés of the ways the LO can be reused
- Offer simplified or full view of the metadata record
- Graphical indications on how many people have downloaded and rated the LO
- What do they think, i.e., star system or graphical display of smiling suns or other
Fedback Techniques
- Using the Annotation Metadata in LOM or
- Social tagging/bookmarking and Folksomy
- Collaborative Fltering Techniques
- Recommendations built on Peer Trust Algorithms
To learn more about feedback techniques, consult the Q4R Repository by entering "feedback technique" or a specific kind of technique as the keyword for search.
Principles:
- Provide interesting and easily understood user statistics, such as stars, percentages, voting systems.
- Include recommendations for reuse by the user, both to the next user and the designer.