Professor Hopkins is creating a lesson unit for his OpenGL course using the UCWISE authoring tool. Since he knows that his lesson will be reused by the other instructors in the UC San Diego computer science department, and possibly other computer science instructors from other schools, he really wants to tag his lesson unit with metadata well. He wants to make sure that the other instructors can easily locate his lesson unit. Professor Hopkin also wants to share his notes with the other instructors on how this lesson unit should be taught, what are the common pitfalls the students have that the new instructors should be aware of, and the difficulty level of the lesson unit.

As Professor Hopkins started to author his lesson unit, he notices there is a link to the metadata tagging tool. So he used the metadata tagging tool to enter the basic metadata information about this lesson unit, as well as to save his notes on this lesson unit which he wants to share with the other instructors. Professor Hopkins completes his lesson authoring in UCWISE.

Scenario 2: Tagging the metadata when pressed for time

It is 9:30am in the morning, the CS3 course will be starting at 10am. Professor Alex is still in the process of finish authoring his lesson unit for the day. He only has a half an hour to finish writing his lesson unit before meeting his students in the lab.

Professor Alex knows that it is important to enter metadata on his lesson unit, but he just does not have time at the moment to bother with entering metadata. He hopes that the metadata tool can automatically collect some metadata for him such as the modified date on the lesson plan, and the fact he is the most recent author/editor of the lesson. He will enter some metadata if it will not take him more than 10 seconds. But he really does not want to deal with entering anything that does not have any immediate benefit to his lesson unit right now.

Professor Alex was able to complete his lesson unit authoring and taught the lesson unit smoothly. He often wishes that he had the time to enter metadata for his lesson units. However, a busy schedule and a lack of short-term benefits do not permit the kind of time necessary for metadata tagging. He has often thought that there needs to be a creative solution to metadata collection that does not compromise a large amount of time.

Scenario 3: Searching a lesson units using metadata

Professor Hopkins is in the process of designing a lesson unit for his OpenGL course. Since this is his first time authoring a curriculum in UCWISE, he wants to look at some of the other UCWISE lessons that the other instructors have authored. Since he is currently designing a final project on how to program a simple moving spaceship game using OpenGL, he wants to look at how a large computer science project is written in UCWISE. He opens the UCWISE lesson unit search tool. He is informed by the lesson unit search tool that the lesson unit he is looking for has to be a large course project that takes about a month to complete and it has to be related to "computer graphics". The metadata search tool returns several projects as the search result. Professor Hopkins looks through all these relevant projects and then designed his final project.

Scenario 4: Sorting and filtering course content based on metadata

The mid term is approaching for the Intro to Java course. Professor Jane wants to set up a review session for her students. During the review session, she wants to give her students a handout containing the material covered thus far, ideas to remember, and key lessons. She wants to categorize her curriculum material by topics to generate this type of handout. She also wants to sort the topics by importance.

She opens the curriculum summary tool in UCWISE which generates a curriculum summary document based on the metadata collected on each of the lesson units. She specified the following criteria in the Curriculum Summary tool: starting lesson unit, ending lesson unit, sort lesson units by topic, and sort lesson units by importance. These entries were intended to help filter the summary and display key points under each lesson unit. The curriculum summary tool then generated her midterm review sheet.

Scenario 5: Updating the metadata when changes are made to a curriculum

Professor Alex will be teaching CS391: Engineering programming at UC Berkeley for fall 2006 for the first time. He wants to get a head start on lesson planning. He will be adopting last fall's curriculum material that was used for the course. As he is reviewing the curriculum material, he wants to make changes to the student project, titled, Write an elevator program. He wants to add a computer graphic component to the elevator program, so the students can actually see a graphical simulation of a moving elevator that is controlled by their program.

After Professor Alex made the changes to the Write an elevator program course project in UCWISE, the metadata tool alerts him if he wants to update the metadata for the current project. Professor Alex almost forgot about the task altogether and was relieved to be greeted by the update reminder. Professor Alex added himself as the co-author for this project. He also modified the description and keywords for the project's metadata.