Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

"The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) is working to make it easier to publish, discover, and deliver quality educational resources on the web....Co-led 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 cricital 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. 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...."