Evolution of Accessibility Metadata in Educational Resources

Introduction

Advances in information and communication technologies, and specifically in multimedia, networking and software engineering have promoted a new generation of online learning environments. Currently, the Internet is the ubiquitous supporting environment for virtual and distributed learning environments. In fact, the adoption and implementation of e-learning innovations have become more demanding in recent years (Valiente et al., 2015). As a result, many organizations, both public and private, take advantage of new technologies to offer educational and training products and services at all levels (Anido et al., 2002). In particular, the wide availability of educational resources is a common objective for universities, libraries, archives and other knowledge-intensive institutions. There is also growing empowerment of instructors to collaborate with their students and other instructors in order to produce, share and reuse educational resources (Valiente et al., 2015). In this context, educational metadata has been recognized as one of the most fruitful fields in the standardization of education technologies (Anido et al., 2002), (Solomou, Pierrakeas, & Kameas, 2015). However, the emergence of large collections of learning resources created through the harvesting and aggregation of metadata have raised important concerns on the suitability of educational resource descriptions as provided in metadata schemas (Valiente et al., 2015). Thus, the ability to effectively manage educational resources in terms of findability, reusability, interoperability and accessibility lies in the adoption of an appropriate metadata schema, able to adequately describe them (Solomou et al., 2015). Despite this fact, only a little research has been done in this area and even more, to the best of our knowledge, there is not a comprehensive solution for the management of accessibility metadata. Accessibility is a key feature to promote inclusive education and training in virtual and distributed learning environments where there is a great diversity in the accessibility needs and preferences of students (Sanchez-Gordon & Luján-Mora, 2018). In this context, this chapter is devoted to better understand the evolution of the accessibility metadata in educational resources by reviewing the most relevant milestones up to date.