Glossary

Active

A state that indicates a user, school, dependent system, class or lesson is available in the system.

Activate

The act of making a user, school, dependent system, class or lesson active.

Archive

The act of making a user, school, dependent system or class archived or inactive.

Archived

A state that indicates a user, school, dependent system or class is no longer required.

BELTS

Basic E-Learning Tool Set. A simple set of tools developed to demonstrate the distribution, management and use of learning objects and to aid investigation of requirements for e-learning environments by Australian and New Zealand jurisdictions.

Class

An organising mechanism used for grouping lessons and/or students and teachers.

Content

A physical or digital asset (work or material) intended for communication. Content can be static, dynamic or scripted instructions. Content covers learning objects, resources, files and metadata.

Content Manager

The user role that enables searching and. downloading content from a parent repository and managing the availability of the content to teachers.

Curriculum Organiser

A tool for assisting teachers to locate online content relevant to learning outcomes. The tool is a list of neutral vocabulary terms, used to describe learning objects, which is mapped to the learning outcomes used within a specific jurisdiction.

Deactivate

The act of making a lesson inactive, so that it is no longer available to students.

Discovery

The act of utilising tools and services to search for and retrieve digital assets from (various) sources (e.g. object repositories, databases, metadata search engines).

Element

A fundamental unit of description used by Metadata. Sometimes referred to as a “field” or “attribute”.

File

An actual and identified digital file.

Filter

To select and display items from a list or search according to specified criteria.

Function

A discreet part of the software that enables a user goal to be carried out, such as “Create a User”.

Inactive

A state that indicates a lesson is no longer available for students to access.

Item

A generic description that encompasses files, learning objects, resources and URLs that can be added to a lesson.

Jurisdiction

School education system (State/Territory) or sector (Independent/Catholic) including all Australian States and Territories and New Zealand.

Dependent System

A downstream system in the content distribution chain that will require access to the BELTS repository. This may be another BELTS system.

Exchange

The name of The Le@rning Federation's content system. It provides the central content management facility within which curriculum content can be submitted, stored, managed and distributed. It is the content repository from where all TLF content will be distributed to jurisdictions.

Learning management system (LMS)

An application that is used for managing the organisation of digital content for presentation to students, provide supporting community tools and may include management of student results.

Learning object

A multimedia learning experience related to a particular educational purpose. Learning objects contain files, organisations, metadata, and other learning objects. The files and sub-ordinate learning objects are used to create the multimedia learning experience. An organisation specifies a navigation path through the learning object. A learning object may have many organisations, and hence many possible navigation paths. Metadata is structured information about the learning object supporting management, description of educational purpose, technical interoperability, digital rights management and accessibility.

Learning outcome

A specific learning objective identified within a jurisdiction’s curriculum framework.

Lesson

A sequence of content and instructions that can be used as part of a learning activity.

LORAX

Learning Object Repository Access and eXchange. The SOAP specification that may be used for searching and downloading learning objects and resources from the Exchange.

Metadata

Metadata is structured information about learning objects and files supporting management, description of educational purpose, technical interoperability, digital rights management and accessibility.

Privilege

A permission that allows a user to perform a specific function in the system.

Repository

A distributed and heterogeneous database of content/metadata that supports open information retrieval protocols.

Resource

An actual and identified physical or digital file (referenced in Items as part of learning objects or as individual items) that may be used in a learning activity

Role

A set of functions that can be performed by a user within the system.

School Administrator

The user role that enables managing school details and creating and managing users and classes within the school.

SOAP

Simple Object Access Protocol. This is a platform independent protocol for accessing services, objects and servers.

Student

The user role that enables viewing lessons prepared by teachers.

System

The implemented BELTS software, hardware, and infrastructure.

Teacher

The user role that enables discovering and preparing content (using lessons) for presentation to students.

The Le@rning Federation

An initiative of State and Federal governments of Australia and the New Zealand government to develop online curriculum content for Australian and New Zealand schools. This initiative is managed by a joint venture between education.au limited and Curriculum Corporation.

User

Any authorised party using the system.