Re: schema.org for educational courses

Hello all,
further to the invitation below to get involved with building a schema 
extension for educational courses, and after some discussion, I have 
proposed a W3C Community Group to continue this work. You can read the 
proposal at
https://www.w3.org/community/blog/2015/12/10/proposed-group-schema-course-extension-community-group/

If you are registered with W3C you can support the proposal, or, once a 
couple more people have supported it, you can join the group. I envisage 
kicking off the work in earnest in the New Year.

For more details on how W3C Community groups work see 
https://www.w3.org/community/about/

Best regards, Phil Barker

On 04/12/2015 09:32, Phil Barker wrote:
> Hello all, this is essentially an invite to get involved with building 
> a schema extension for educational courses, by way of a description of 
> some of the work so far.
>
> I'm sending this primarily to the schema.org mail list, but cc-ing to 
> LRMI and DC-Education where I hope there will also be some interest. 
> (In case you don't know, LRMI = Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, 
> part of DCMI. I'm a member of the task group, you are welcome to get 
> involved if it sounds interesting[1].)
>
> About a year ago there was a flurry of discussion about wanting to 
> markup descriptions of courses in schema [2]. Vicky Tardiff-Holland 
> produced a proposal [3] which we discussed in LRMI and elsewhere as a 
> result of which various suggestions were and comments were added to 
> that proposal.
>
> I also led some work in LRMI around scope, use cases, requirements, 
> existing data; which I hoped would lead to some validating/refining 
> the proposal by some example data that could be used to demonstrate 
> that it met the use cases [4].
>
> I am up for another push on courses. I share the doc I was working on 
> [4] in the hope that it is good starting point. It's a bit long, so 
> here is an overview of what it contains:
> *
> - scope:* concerning discovery of any type of educational course 
> (online/offline, long/short, scheduled/on-demand) Educational course 
> defined as "some sequence of events and/or creative works which aims 
> to build knowledge, competence or ability of learners". (out of scope: 
> information about students and their progression etc; information 
> needed internally for course management rather than discovery)
>
> *- comparators*: a review of some established ways of sharing similar data
>
> *- use cases
> - requirements arising from the use cases
>
> - mapping to some existing examples*. I used hypothes.is[5] to 
> annotate existing web pages that describe different types of course, 
> e.g. from Coursera or a University, tagging the requirement that the 
> data was relevant to. Here's an example of a page as tagged: 
> https://goo.gl/1IWjOh (click on a yellow highlight to show the 
> relevant requirement as a comment with a tag)
> hypothes.is aggregates the selected information for each tag, to give 
> a list of the information relevant to each use case, for example 
> https://hypothes.is/stream?q=tag:%27reqC%27
>
> I think the next step would be to review the use cases and 
> requirements in light of some of the observations from the mapping, 
> and to look again at the proposal to see how it reflects the data 
> available/required. But first I want to try to get more people 
> involved, see whether anyone has a better idea for how to progress, or 
> if anyone wants to check the work so far and help move it forward.
>
> I'm aware the docs and discussions so far around schema for courses 
> are a scattered set of scraps and drafts. If there is enough interest 
> it would be really useful to have it in one place.
>
> Phil
>
> 1. Task group at 
> http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/AB-Comm/ed/LRMI/TG , specs at 
> http://dublincore.org/dcx/lrmi-terms/1.1/ and general info at 
> http://www.lrmi.net/
> 2. See issue 195 on github 
> https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/195
> 3. 
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YWjLzZC8FiTiOwSAETRIEozeqZdn6O8a4fgqK4t5Ss/edit#
> 4. 
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-s5HjNkWUtIoLAHjRcUZljBWEdHQIupk-KscAEIbFA/edit#
> 5. https://hypothes.is/
> -- 
> Phil Barker           @philbarker
> LRMI, Cetis, ICBLhttp://people.pjjk.net/phil
> Heriot-Watt University
>
> Workflow:http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/workflow/
>
>
>
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-- 
Phil Barker           @philbarker
LRMI, Cetis, ICBL     http://people.pjjk.net/phil
Heriot-Watt University

Workflow: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/workflow/



----- 
We invite research leaders and ambitious early career researchers to 
join us in leading and driving research in key inter-disciplinary themes. 
Please see www.hw.ac.uk/researchleaders for further information and how
to apply.

Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity
registered under charity number SC000278.