1&4. Yes, I have described in the past learning resources using metadata and most probably will have to do it again in the future. Describing it manually is a time consuming activity, but useful for the obvious reasons: indexing and retrieving, but most of all sharing&exchanging resources of different repositories. 2. On the other hand, I have few times tried to find specific resources using their metadata descriptions and realised that many times this was not helpful. I think that one element that is usually misleading for me is the title of the resource. In most cases this didn't offer the sufficient information that a title should and thus made the resource look unattractive/ useless. 3. So when talking about quality it should not necessarily refer to completeness (there are so many elements that are not that important when searching for a resource, such as size, format etc), but to relevance. When the results of a search engine are more relevant than the ones of an educational portal.. you start to worry. Good metadata is objective metadata. :)

Q1& Q3: I agree that an educational resource could be any material used for educational purposes, but doesn't this complicate the process through which we define and control the quality of resources? Regarding the quality issue, which is a very complex one, I believe that quality should mainly be defined based on the efficiency of the materials, and less on some pre-defined standards. That is because when we talk about education the focus should be on learning and on the outcomes of the learning process. The same resource might be appreciated differently by different learners; the same learning outcome might be reached by following very different learning paths. Therefore, it is very difficult, and I am not sure if really necessary either, to try to build detailed quality assurance tools for the educational resources. I believe that it might be easier and probably more helpful to concentrate on building/using efficient assessment tools to assess our students' performances rather than the resources used. On the other hand, this approach might be riskier, as we can't get much information about the usefulness of the resources we use until after having used them on our students. In this case, belonging to a community of teachers that exchange information and experiences is essential.