EOCred: Identify the level of a credential

The next use case I would like to discuss is around identifying the 
level of an educational / occupational credential currently stated as: 
it should be possible to search or review results of a search by 
specific credential level, e.g. post-graduate, High school, entry, 
intermediate, advanced.

To do this we need to be able to relate an educational / occupational 
credential to a description or representation of an educational level. I 
see two options for this:

A. we do the same as is currently done for learning resources and 
courses and use the educationalAlignement 
<http://schema.org/educationalAlignment>property to point to an 
AlignmentObject <http://schema.org/AlignmentObject> which in turn points 
to and/or describes an educational level.

B. we add a new property educationalLevel which could point to either an 
AlignmentObject or directly to a DefinedTerm for the educational level.

I'm interested in anyone's thoughts on which they would prefer.


=A bit of background to the AlignmentObject.=

- the educationalAlignment / AligmentObject pairing is useful when you 
don't want to pre-define and thus limit types of alignments involved by 
having a few properties for specific alignments (that's at the root of 
why LRMI introduced it, here we have a specific alignment type we know 
we want.)

- the AlignmentObject is useful when the thing to which you are aligning 
is not properly defined a a firstclass schema.org object; it allows you 
to refer to it by description

- the AlignmentObject is useful when you want to say things about the 
alignment itself (e.g. describe who asserts the alignment is true and 
how they came to this judgement) though this ability is under developed 
and to my knowledge not used

- research <https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3054160>[*] into LRMI 
schema.org markup in the wild suggests that the AlignmentObject (and 
relatively more complex / abstract approaches in general) are used less 
frequently than simpler property - value [literal] relationships.

- the Open Badges spec uses an alignment property to point from a badge 
class to an AlignmentObject representing objectives or educational 
standards (which is slightly different to this use case, though we 
several use cases for aligning to competencies)


Please let me know your thoughts.

Phil


* open access copy of that paper at 
https://blogs.pjjk.net/phil/confpaper/analysing-improving-embedded-markup-learning-resources-web/


-- 

Phil Barker <http://people.pjjk.net/phil>. http://people.pjjk.net/phil
PJJK Limited <https://www.pjjk.co.uk>: technology to enhance learning; 
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