Defining a metadata schema for serious games as learning objects

Games are increasingly recognized for their educational potential. However, when used as a learning resource, games can differ substantially from other educational media. They often combine high-fidelity audio and video content with experiential, social, or exploratory pedagogy. As educators increasingly turn to technology to support the delivery and management of content, the capability to describe and package serious games effectively as reusable learning objects (LOs) is increasingly vital. Doing so requires developing the capability to express games not in terms of technical boundaries, but as coherent and discrete LOs, which can be reused and combined. Enabling this requires metadata be attached to games, whilst making the metadata schema explicit to allow the use of the metadata beyond its original scope. Furthermore, standardisation of metadata schema means that systems are able to work together and use data interchangeably. However, current standards for describing educational content cannot directly be utilized to describe these serious games as educational resources. This makes it difficult to include serious games in repositories of learning objects and to describe them in a coherent way in the various online repositories. This paper introduces a metadata schema for describing serious games as educational resources, based on existing standards, so that serious games content can be described within online repositories.