UNESCO-IBE Education Thesaurus

"Since 1998, the International Bureau of Education has concentrated its activities on the adaptation of educational content to the challenges of the twenty-first century, focusing on the strengthening of capacity-building in the area of curriculum change. In 2000, thanks to the collaboration of the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales (NFER), work began on updating the Thesaurus, taking into account the terminology of the IBE’s new framework programme and the report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty- First Century, Learning: the treasure within, also known as the Delors report. Many new descriptors were introduced, while changes were made to the terms dealing with teaching and learning methods, and to the educational technology terms. Some descriptors and identifiers were eliminated. At the same time the number of explanatory notes was increased. In 2002, further developments took place with the introduction of new descriptors relating to curriculum and to HIV/AIDS education, in line with the IBE’s new activities. This latest October 2007 revision includes the addition of over 130 new terms, presented in the same format as the 2002 revision, and also available on the Internet in English only. The IBE is indebted to colleagues in the UNESCO Institute of Lifelong Learning, Hamburg, the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, Santiago, and the Caribbean Educational Research Information Service (CERIS), University of the West Indies who collaborated with suggestions for new terms and modifications.

The UNESCO-IBE Education Thesaurus is an important indexing tool in the education field. Its descriptors are used for indexing materials in the electronic catalogue IBEDOCS, and the Thesaurus is the principal tool in many educational documentation centres around the world."