Situation-based e-learning in software engineering: using software engineering-related metadata to improve self-empowered learning

Self empowered learning is a great challenge for professionals in software engineering. Due to everyday work, there is often no time or need for complete courses or textbooks on a broad topic. This challenge leads to multiple approaches like learning objects, micro learning and learning nuggets. Critical part of these approaches is to provide metadata to each resource in order to place the resource in context, enabling the learner to easily retrieve resources and the lecturer to reuse the material. Metadata definitions like LOM or IMS-LD are however defined on a generic level, suitable for education in general, without considering specific domain characteristics. Additionally, much of the available learning material focuses on acquisition of knowledge, rather than the empowerment to perform new tasks in the learners current situation. In this paper we present a preliminary model to describe the software engineering specific context of learning material that can be used to extend existing metadata definitions in learning management systems.