2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Within the TeL literature there are existing works that have examined the added value of socially tagging
digital educational resources. An initial study towards addressing this issue has been conducted in the
framework of the EU-funded project “MELT: a Metadata Ecology for Learning and Teaching”
(http://info.melt-project.eu/) (Zens et al., 2009; Vuorikari and Ayre, 2009). More specifically, MELT project
developed a LOR including around 153.000 digital educational resources. These resources were
characterized by the resources’ authors with educational metadata following an application profile of the
IEEE LOM standard, as well as with social tags added by the end-users of the repository (that is students and
teachers). During the evaluation study of the project, the MELT Repository included 10131 social tags,
which had been added to 2008 digital educational resources. This means that on average 4 social tags were
added per digital educational resource. The main issues that were investigated during the MELT project
evaluation study were the following:
I1: usefulness of social tags for searching digital educational resources.
I2: usefulness of social tags as metadata descriptors of digital educational resources.
The evaluation results in respect to the aforementioned issues showed that:
I1: 23% of searches in MELT Repository were performed based on social tags and 40% of these
searches were found very useful. However, for accurate searches within MELT Repository, social
tags were considered not useful.