MELT: A Metadata Ecology for Teaching and Learning

Duration October 2006 - March 2009
Research sponsor EU eContent plus programm
Head of the evaluation Mag. Birgit Zens, Univ. Prof. Peter Baumgartner
Research staff members Eva Meisinger, Wolfgang Morgeditsch
Project partners European schoolnet (project management), 12 federal ministries, commercial and non-profit developers of e-content, leading researchers in semantic inter-operability, and experts in educational quality assurance

The MELT project was part of the strategy of the European Schoolnet and addressed the need of a European learning resource exchange among schools and educational ministries. The goal was to develop a central system enabling teachers and pupils to more effectively and efficiently find and exchange freely available learning materials in European content repositories and to use these resources for teaching activities. Essential part of the project was the development of a central portal and the enrichment of learning materials with structured metadata by experts and with so-called social tags by the users of the content (teachers).

The goal of the evaluation was to assess the effectiveness of MELT in terms of previously defined success indicators, such as the quantity and quality of metadata, the number of social tags and their utility for locating content, the utility of metadata search, and the effectiveness and efficiency of the search process. Furthermore, the availability and the quality of content in MELT and its use (across language and across border) were also examined along with users' satisfaction with the portal.

Final Evaluation Report (PDF 3,22 MB)

MELT Project Site