Increasing retrievability and reusability oflearning material by developing a measure of relevance based onacademic teachers' conceptions

Web-based or web-supported teaching and learning are fast developing applications of information and communication technologies. One of the latest developments is the use of (multimedia) databases of learning material. One of the key problems concerns the retrieval of relevant units of learning material (ULM's). Examples of ULM's are written chapters, video segments, computer simulations, audio fragments, computer-based training packages, and so on [HiddinkHiddink1998]. This contribution reports about a research and development project that tries to enhance retrievability of ULM's by developing a measure of relevance based on a set of metadata labels that is related to the preferences of academic teachers for certain characteristics of learning material. The measure of relevance will take the form of a distance measure in a metric space that models the collection of ULMs present in the database. The project consists of two parts: (a) development of a distance measure that is based on the importance teachers assign to characteristics of learning material, and (b) testing the usability of the distance measure with a set of ULM's in an experimental database. The presentation focuses on the first step: the development of a distance measure.