LRMI History
- Today—2014 to Present
- Initial Development Phase—2011–2014
- Founding Technical Working Group
- Founding Advisory Group
1. Today—2014 to Present
Effective 23 October 2014, the LRMI 1.1 specification was transferred to the Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative (DCMI). A full description of the terms of the transfer is available. The responsibility of stewardship and the further development of the LRMI specification belongs to a new permanent LRMI Task Group (LTG) as an adjunct to DCMI's long-standing Education Community. The work of the LTG is advanced through the definition of specific work packages with specific tasks, goals, and timeframes.
2. Initial Development Phase—2011–2014
Since its establishment in 2011, LRMI (orginially the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) has worked to make it easier to publish, discover, and deliver quality educational resources on the web.
Co-led from spring 2011 through fall 2014 by the Association of Educational Publishers—the 501(c)(3) division of the Association of American Publishers—and Creative Commons, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the LRMI has developed a common metadata framework for describing or "tagging" learning resources on the web. This framework is a key first step in developing a richer, more fruitful search experience for educators and learners. Once a critical mass of educational content has been tagged to a universal framework, it becomes much easier to parse and filter that content, opening up tremendous possibilities for search and delivery.
The LRMI was spurred by the announcement in 2011 of Schema.org, a project by Bing, Google, and Yahoo! to create a standard way of tagging online content. While not directly connected, Schema.org created the opportunity for initiatives such as the LRMI by establishing a standard markup schema for general web content and then encouraging specialized communities and industries to extend this schema to meet their needs. The metadata schema developed by the LRMI was adopted by Schema.org in April 2013, meaning that anyone who publishes or curates educational content can now use LRMI markup to provide rich, education-specific metadata about their resources with the confidence that this metadata will be recognized by major search engines.
Association of Educational Publishers (AEP)
Founded in 1895, the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) served for more than a century as the only professional organization serving the diverse needs of the entire educational resource community. Originally formed to meet the needs of a few key educational journals, the membership of AEP expanded over the years to include the wide range of individuals, institutions, and businesses dedicated to delivering progressive learning resources in all media and for any educational setting.
For many years, AEP remained at the forefront of the educational publishing industry, leading initiatives that helped drive the future of content development and delivery. It took a leading role in many efforts supporting the industry, including the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), which is changing the way educational materials are found on the Internet; awards programs and conferences; and representation of educational publishers on matters such as new legislation and funding.
In 2013, AEP merged with the School Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to form the PreK-12 Learning Group. That group continues working to inform and advance the industry and to define and applaud excellence in the field.
AEP now serves as the 501(c)(3) arm of AAP, and it has continued to lead and administer the LRMI throughout the course of its grant funding.
For more information about the PreK-12 Learning Group, please visit http://www.aepweb.org
Creative Commons (CC)
With the Internet, universal access to education is possible, but its potential is hindered by outdated copyright laws and incompatible technologies. Creative Commons works to minimize these barriers, by providing licenses and tools that anyone, from individual creators to large companies and institutions, can use to share their educational materials with the world. CC licenses are a simple, standardized way to keep your copyright while allowing certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” approach that builds upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright. CC licenses make textbooks and lesson plans easy to find, easy to share, and easy to customize and combine — helping to realize the full benefits of digitally enabled education.
Throughout the initiative, Creative Commons has provided expert knowledge and leadership in developing and stewarding critical legal and technology infrastructure to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, ensuring interoperability of openly licensed educational materials.
Visit the Creative Commons website.
3. Founding Technical Working Group
For phase 1 of the LRMI project, in 2011, a Technical Working Group was formed and was charged with producing—with the input of an official Advisory Group and informed by public comment and feedback—a common metadata vocabulary for learning resources. The group submitted this framework to Schema.org (a project by Bing, Google, and Yahoo! to develop and encourage use of metadata vocabularies), and it was accepted in April 2013. The group also has worked on recommendations for long-term governance of the standard.
Membership (2011-2014):
Sheryl Abshire
Calcasieu Parish Public School System
Sheryl Abshire is the Chief Technology Officer for the Calcasieu Parish School System in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and is Assistant professor at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. She has been involved in diverse staff development programs throughout the United States and Great Britain, which involved restructuring schools through the infusion of technology and curriculum enhancements. Considered a leader in technology integration, she serves as the catalyst to initiate the integration of technology into all curriculum areas throughout her school district, the state, and internationally.Abshire has served in an educational capacity for 38 years. Prior to joining Calcasieu Parish School System, she worked as a school principal, K-5 teacher, library/media specialist, and adjunct professor at McNeese State University and Louisiana Tech University.
Her distinguished accolades include being 1991 NEA/NFIE Christa McAuliffe Fellow, 1990 Louisiana Technology Teacher of the Year, 1992 National Teacher Hall of Fame Inductee, 1998 Louisiana Computer Using Educator of the Year, 1999 McNeese State University Distinguished Alumnus, 2002 National Christa McAuliffe Award winner and the 2008 University of New Orleans Outstanding Doctoral Student in Educational Leadership, and a nationally recognized consultant/speaker. In May of 2009, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) awarded Abshire the first Public Policy Advocate of the Year Award for her work promoting educational technology. Abshire serves on the ISTE Standards and Accreditation Committee.She holds a Bachelor's of Science in early childhood education, a Master's of Education in elementary education, is an educational specialist in school administration and supervision, and holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of New Orleans in educational leadership and administration.
Phil Barker
JISC CETIS
JISC CETIS, The Center for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, provides advice to the UK higher and post-16 education sectors on educational technology and standards. Barker currently serves as the learning technology advisor. Barker's main areas of work have been resource description and discovery, repositories and resource management, and open educational resources (OERs). His personal interests have led to work within higher education focused on the evaluation of computer-based resources for engineering and physical science education.
Barker's vast experience in OERs has included work on the Delores OER project, which builds collections of OERs for engineering design to incorporate into the Bayesian feed filtering project. He served as an associate of the HE Academy Engineering Subject Centre and contributed to their OER pilot project, as well as to the Materials Subject Centre's CORE Materials OER project. More projects include Reset and LearnEM, each relating to the promotion of the sharing of learning resources for engineering, and the Learning Materials Application Profile Scoping Study relating to metadata for learning resources.He studied at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom before obtaining a Doctorate of Philosophy and completing three years of research in the area of polymer crystallization.
Dan Brickley
VU University Amsterdam
Brickley, a Web-TV researcher, co-chairs the Semantic Web interest group and the newly-formed Social Web incubator group at VU University Amsterdam. His main focus is open standards, open source, and open content on the Web.
Brian Carver
UC Berkeley School of Information
At UC Berkeley School of Information, Brian Carver's primary research focus has been the laws and policies governing technology and information, with particular interest in understanding the technical, economic, social, and legal frameworks that best promote progress and access to information. The collaborative forms of creativity enabled or enhanced through computer networks and the ways in which law or other factors facilitate or frustrate creativity and innovation have been paramount for Carver as an educator. His most current research focuses on copyright law, open source and free software, technology and innovation policy, and the regulation of the Internet.
Cable Green
Creative Commons
As Director of Global Learning, Green leads the education projects at Creative Commons. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms. Cable is an advocate for open policies that ensure access to publicly-funded education materials. He mixes digital technologies, open licensing, standards, and policies to significantly improve access to quality, affordable, open educational resources.Previously, he served as Director of eLearning & Open Education for the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. There he led a project to build and share highest-enrolled courses under a Creative Commons Attribution license, known as the “Open Course Library.” In addition, he served as the Director of Technology for the Ohio Learning Network and Director of Educational Technology for the Ohio State University College of Pharmacy where he built Ohio State's first online doctoral program.He holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in educational technology from Ohio State University, a Master of Art in communication from Ohio State University, an MPC from Westminster College, and a Bachelor's of Science in international affairs from Lewis and Clark College.
Greg Grossmeier
Creative Commons (Co-Chair)
Grossmeier has served as the Education Technology and Policy Coordinator at Creative Commons since July 2011. He focuses on how Open Education projects can better create, disseminate, and reuse educational materials.Prior to joining Creative Commons, Grossmeier served as a Copyright Specialist at the University of Michigan Library. He has also worked with Open.Michigan, an initiative related to open sharing of academic research, outreach, and policy.He holds a Master's of Science in Information Policy and Library and Information Services from the University of Michigan.
Charlie Jiang
Microsoft
As Principal Architect for Microsoft's Online Services division, Charlie Jiang works with the Bing Core Search Team to develop open-ecosystem search platforms.Prior to joining Microsoft's Online Services division, Jiang served as the Chief Architect of the Mobile Group and Open Application Platform Group at Yahoo Inc. He was also a Senior Engineering Scientist at IBM and an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University.Charlie Jiang has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wayne State University and a Bachelor's of Engineering in Computer Engineering from Tsinghua University. He received executive education at the Harvard Business School.
Michael Johnson
Full Potential Associates
Since 1985, Johnson has been designing, developing, and delivering technology solutions for government entities, publishing companies, universities, public and school libraries, and classrooms of all types. In 2008, Johnson founded Full Potential Associates, which is a consultancy focused on the strategic and technical issues facing the publishing and education world.His career spans small technology companies such as The Library Corporation all the way up to large multinational distribution companies such as Follett Corporation.In 2000, while at Follett, Johnson started his involvement in strategy at the broader group and corporate levels. This strategy work went well beyond products and existing markets to involve things such as corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
In 2005, Johnson founded the Follett Digital Resources business unit within Follett Corporation. In addition to running that business unit, he was a member of Follett's Senior Leadership Group and Follett's IT Leadership Council. Johnson's operation was the group charged with driving Follett Corporation's digital strategy.Johnson was involved in a series of M&A activities during his time at Follett, with two of the projects (ICI and Fourteen40) being directly acquired by Follett Digital Resources.Johnson has been involved in a wide variety of industry committees, sub-committees, and work groups. He is a frequent panelist, moderator, and speaker on strategic and technical topics across the country and abroad.
Mike Linksvayer
Creative Commons (Co-Chair)
Linksvayer joined Creative Commons as Chief Technology Officer in 2003 and became Vice President in April 2007. Previously he co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data service. Before founding Bitzi, Linksvayer developed the framework for Internet billing applications at Avolent. As a web engineer and consultant, Mike has led the development of dozens of web applications and worked on early broadband content projects at two multimedia startups. He holds a Bachelor's of Art in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Joshua Marks
Curriki
Mr. Marks heads technology development and operations for Curriki, the leading K-12 non-profit global community for teachers, students, and parents to create, share, and find open learning resources. In this role he sets the technical direction, manages the development teams, and collaborates with partners, contributors, and the open source software community to design and provide the tools needed to realize Curriki's innovative vision of open access and teacher and student empowerment.
Prior to Curriki, Joshua served as Senior System Architect at CTB/McGraw-Hill, leading the creation of an enterprise-wide service oriented architecture for assessment development, delivery, analytics, and reporting for high-scale high-stakes tests. Prior to that he served as Director of eLearning technology at Harcourt Education, where, among other projects, he spearheaded the nation's first one-to-one tablet pilot for K-12 in 2002. Joshua has also participated with numerous educational standards organizations over the years representing Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Curriki. The first decade of Mr. Marks' career was focused on designing and publishing some of the first consumer learning games on personal computers at The Learning Company and Electronic Arts, back when RadioShack still made computers and CD-ROMs were the hot new technology.
Brandt Redd
Gates Foundation
Brandt Redd is Senior Technology Officer for Education Programs at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and contributes to foundation efforts in College Readiness and Postsecondary Success.
Redd has been working with digital media and education for more than 25 years. He co-founded Folio Corporation and Agilix Labs. Between those efforts, he served as Chief Scientist at Ancestry.com.Redd has a BS in Computer Science and an MBA, both from Brigham Young University. He is co-inventor of three patents and multiple patents pending. In a diverse career, he has served as a software engineer, project manager, DBA, chief scientist, and CTO. He has invented search algorithms, architected security and permissions infrastructure, built and broken DRM, and reverse-engineered data formats and software algorithms.
Colin Smythe
IMS Global
IMS Global Learning Consortium advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. To further this mission, the IMS community develops open interoperability standards, supports and encourages adoption of technical services, through programs that highlight effective practices. Smythe has been consulting for IMS Global since 1999. In his role as chief architect, he is responsible for managing the development and maintenance of the full suite of IMS specifications.
For 25 years Symthe has worked in both the academic and the industrial world. Prior to IMS Global, he was a lecturer at the Universities of Durham and Surrey, worked for several years at Logica Ltd., was the founder and managing director of the systems consultancy Hyperion Systems Ltd, and is currently a Director and Principal Consultant at Dunelm Services Limited. He served as a member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, UK where he was Head of Department and Chair of Computer Science from 1992-1999. During the last seven years, he has worked on a number of public and private sector e-learning projects. In 1999, Smythe was made a Fellow of the British Computer Society and became a Chartered Engineer. He holds a degree in Applied Physics and a Doctorate of Philosophy with a research focus on spread spectrum local area networks. Both degrees were obtained at University Durham in the United Kingdom.
Stuart Sutton
Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative
As Managing Director and CEO of the Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative, Sutton's research areas include metadata and networked information discovery and retrieval, technology-mediated teaching and learning, cognition and the information-seeking behavior of discourse communities, mental models in information system design, and the law and policy of intellectual property. Currently, he teaches in the areas of information law and policy, legal informatics, and the organization of information. Sutton is an associate professor emeritus with the Information School of the University of Washington, Seattle.
He has served on the faculties of Syracuse University and San Jose State University and in a visiting position at the University of California at Berkeley.Sutton received his Master's and Doctorate of Philosophy degrees from the University of California at Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies. He received his Juris Doctorate from Golden Gate University School of Law and his Master's of Law in Copyright from the University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. He holds Bachelor's of Art and Master's of Art degrees in Theatre Arts from San Francisco State University.
Randy Wilhelm
netTrekker
Randy Wilhelm passionately believes that students must be the ultimate and natural focus of education and learning. A driven leader creating dialogue, opportunity, and innovation in education, Wilhelm is the CEO and co-founder of netTrekker, a leader in the delivery of digital K-12 educational content.The company's flagship product, netTrekker Search, pioneered educational search tools in K-12 schools by delivering safe, relevant, educator-reviewed digital resources and personalized learning tools to support students' individual learning needs. With netTrekker Search, Wilhelm led the industry to change how digital curriculum is tagged, sorted, and delivered to all stakeholders in K-12 education.
Prior to netTrekker, Wilhelm was an Executive Vice President at USI Midwest (NASDAQ:USIH), where he was a key leader who managed and delivered rapid and sustainable growth at one of the world's leading insurance brokers.He has a degree in economics from DePauw University, and serves on multiple education and youth related not-for-profit boards and committees.
Lee Wilson
PCI Educational Publishing
PCI Education offers real-life approaches to teaching basic academic skills and life skills to struggling students, from Special Education to the regular classroom, and from ESL to Adult Education. Wilson has completed two terms on the AEP Board of Directors. He has more than 20 years of experience in the K-12 field with expertise in strategy, products, marketing, and sales issues for technology and print publishers.Prior to joining PCI Education, Wilson operated Headway Strategies, a Texas-based management consulting firm focused on the education industry. He has also served as Vice President, Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer at Harcourt Achieve; Regional Vice President of Pearson Learning Group; and General Manager of K12Planet.com at Chancery Software. In his seven years at Apple Computer, Wilson held a variety of positions, including Business Development Manager and K-12 Enterprise Solutions Marketing Specialist.He has an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor's Degree in History and Political Science from Princeton University.
4. Founding Advisory Group
The Technical Working Group has drawn on both the technical and practical knowledge of the LRMI Advisory Group to ensure the outcome of the project meets the needs of all constituencies. The Advisory Group was designed to be comprised of representatives from the project's initial launch partners. The designations below were current as of the time the Advisory Group was constituted.
Membership (2011-2014):
Emilio Bernabei
Director Business Ecosystem
SMART Technologies Inc.
Midian Kurland
SVP Technology and Development
Scholastic Inc.
Gary Lopez
Executive Director
Monterey Institute for Technology in Education
Madi Solomon
Director, Content Standards
Pearson
Ramona Pierson
Head of Science Education, Chief Science Officer
Promethean
Chris Chung
Dir. Content Structure and Standards
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Lisa Petrides
President and Founder
ISKME – Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
Kim Jones
CEO
Curriki
Neeru Khosla
Executive Director & Co-Founder
CK-12
Erin Osborn
VP of Operations and Outreach
BetterLesson
Ron Rheinheimer
Vice President
Pearson Education
Mark Robinson
Head of Education Product Strategy
Promethean
Stephen Howe
Product Manager
McGraw-Hill Education