Curriculum Exchange Format
Information about the CEN/ISSS WSLT project for a Curriculum Exchange Format (CEF)
CEN Workshop for Learning Technologies www.cen.eu/isss/workshop/LT/
Email List
An email list is available for those wishing to be informed of progress or who wish to comment on the drafts.
General information about the mailing list is at:
https://listserv.eun.org/mailman/listinfo/cef
Learning resources can be found on the Internet or in a computer system. They are often stored in an organised way in repositories with information about them. The information is called metadata and it helps to search, browse and filter then find additional information.
Some of the keywords that are put into metadata can be based on words or phrases taken from real curricula so that learners and teachers can relate to them. Adding these terms to metadata and associating them with a resource is called tagging.
Curricula often have a tree like structure that presents topics and objectives in a particular way. This structure can be used to navigate or browse to the terms that are used in the metadata and so link to useful resources.
The Curriculum Exchange Format (CEF) project is going to produce an agreed way of representing curriculum information intended for tagging resources and browsing repositories or learning platforms. The CEF could also be used to share competency information about learners based on the same curricula.
A project team have been appointed to lead this work on behalf of a European workshop (CEN ISSS WSLT - Workshop for Learning Technologies). The outcomes will be a set of guidelines agreed by the workshop and published as a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA).
They will also produce a formal European Standard, in the committee CEN TC353, which will define the technical details of how to make CEF files.
The CEF will have to be capable of having information in different languages and to represent a range of relationships between curriculum items.
The main benefit that will result from widespread use of the CEF will be that learners and teachers will be able to find resources using a curriculum that they are familiar with and using their preferred language. The resources they find may come from lots of different sources and have been originally organised by a different curriculum.
Developers of web sites, learning platforms and publishers of resources can all share information in an agreed way making it easier for them to interoperate. The impact on learners and teachers will be smoother moving between different software and web sites and a more personalised experience.
Requirements
Some additional resources and references
Draft Zthes Schema update
For queries about this site please email CEF@schemeta.com
