From the Education Metadata Meetup on 7/30/14 in Washington, DC - Pearson's Marlowe Johnson discusses how the conversation around metadata within Pearson has changed, and how they use metadata to support their strategic focus on efficacy.

1. Simon
Wilkinson
Director
of
Product
EQUELLA
Content
Pla;orm
A Shift in the ‘Metadata Conversation’
(what a difference executive mandate can make)
Previous conversation with Editorial:
Here are the metadata standards. Now please populate the required fields…
Why?...because they are required fields…and this will help with discovery of your
content…we think…
New Conversation:
Our next generation of products will provide rich capabilities around learner analytics and
adaptive learning, but the content flowing into them needs to be sufficiently enriched and
modularized. Here are the requirements we have identified for content. Cool? …cool.
Oh…and here are some supporting technologies to ensure you can enrich content at
scale.

2. A couple of HE product use cases:
- A blind econ student struggling with a elasticity curves is led to less advanced supplemental
content that is accessible and that builds comprehension…then to formative assessment items
that reinforce and record the learning. The student can view his progress towards mastery of
course objectives.
- A physics professor prepping for next week’s class receives an alert on her phone that 80% of
her students missed an important homework question on velocity. She decides to review that
topic at the start of next class.
Both of these use cases depend on a combination of activity data and content
metadata.
Metadata as Necessary Component of Learner Insights
but not sufficient

3. The level of insight without availability of content metadata:
- A blind econ student struggling with a elasticity curves is led to supplemental content that is
accessible and that builds comprehension…then to formative assessment items reinforce and
record the learning. The student can view progress towards mastery of course objectives.
- A physics professor prepping for next week’s class receives an alert on her phone that 80% of
her students missed an important homework question on velocity. She decides to review that
topic at the start of next class.
Message to my stakeholders:
If content is not “efficacy enabled”, our next-gen products cannot deliver efficacy
analytics and adaptive learning.
Metadata as Necessary Component of Learner Insights