Proceedings

pedagogical object is annotated using different elements or meta-data such as its
associated access rights, technical requirements and features, educational
particularities, etc.
The LOM standard (2002) specifies the syntax and semantics of the pedagogical
meta-data and also defines the necessary attributes for an appropriate and complete
description of pedagogical objects, by regrouping these objects in nine categories
(generalities, life cycle, meta-meta-data, technical information, pedagogical
information, rights, relationships, comments and classification). The purpose of LOM
is to allow retrieval of OPs, prepare them, and introduce certain pedagogical
dimensions in their description. It should be noted that many research papers propose
the substitution of one or more LOM elements by concepts which belong to
ontologies, in order to solve some problems of semantic ambiguity. Implementing the
LOM standard can be done using XML or RDF (Ouafia et al., 2009).
The SCORM standard (2004) guides the creation of structured pedagogical resources
and also treats the following elements (Pernin, 2004):
• Packing – allows the transfer of the pedagogical objects content, focusing on
their structure. A package represents an archived file that contains educational
resources, such as HTML, JPG, Word files, attended by an XML file
containing multiple sections, including the section reserved for meta-data
(where the package is described), the resources section (which consists of a
list of resources along with the connections to the (URL), and an organization
section (which contains the structure of resources).
• Meta-data – allows the structuring of information which describes the nature
and the objectives of the content.
• Communication – manages the access to the pedagogical objects within the
learning network.
• Sequence and browsing – establish the access mode in terms of the activities
tree.
The aggregation of content is structured on three levels:
� Basic digital resources represent the basis of pedagogical objects and can be
found in the form of simple elements, such as HTML files;
� Shared objects are composed of multiple basic objects, in accordance with the
SCROM protocol. They represent the lowest level of granularity that the
pedagogical objects can have in an e-learning platform;
� Aggregation of the content consists in a number of educational resources,
structured as modules and lessons.
A pedagogical object can combine more elementary components: DOC, JPG, PDF
files, or other pedagogical objects. The LOM meta-data and the SCORM structure
allow, on one hand, the description and the indexing the pedagogical objects using the
LOM meta-data and, on the other hand, structuring of the pedagogical objects in
conformity with the SCORM standard.
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