The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons, aims to improve online search for learning resources by creating a standard markup language for identifying educational content on the web.
Recent surveys were conducted to to gather feedback from both educators and resource providers about the current state of online educational search. Of the educators surveyed, more than 7 in 10 (72.6%) said they search for instructional resources on the Internet at least several times a week, with 25.8% stating they search daily. Sixty-six percent of educators said they get many “irrelevant results” and 9 in 10 said they would be more satisfied with Internet searches if search engines offered the ability to filter results by standard instructional criteria such as grade level, subject area, and media type.
Nearly half (46.4%) of educational publishers and resource providers responding to the survey said they are either “dissatisfied” or “somewhat dissatisfied” with the current online visibility of their products and more than half (57.1%) stated that their customers find it “difficult” or “somewhat difficult” to find their content and products when conducting online searches.
Complete survey data will be available in mid-summer 2012. For more information, visit http://lrmi.net/
