From eSchool News, June 28) — A new partnership between the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons aims to improve internet search results for teachers and students by creating a metadata framework designed specifically for learning resources.

The organizations announced the partnership at the 2011 Content in Context conference in early June.

“Educators and students miss out on education resources available online because it is takes too long or is too hard to find appropriate content,” said Catherine Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons. “A common metadata schema will make this search more efficient and effective so educators can quickly discover the educational resources they want, including those they can reuse under Creative Commons licenses.”

Several other leading organizations, including Curriki, Pearson, Promethean, and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, have voiced support for the Learning Resource Metadata initiative and have agreed to help develop the specifications.

The Learning Resource Metadata initiative will work with Schema.org, a web metadata framework. Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Bing recently announced the Schema.org project, which will create a universal framework for tagging web-based content to make internet searches faster. Google Shopping and Google Recipes are prototype examples of how metadata can improve search results and presentation. Read the entire article here.