Re: EOCred: Identify the level of a credential

Based on similar experiences in other Schema.org extension areas, when it
has become complex/difficult to gain consensus on a particular point,
especially with an initial proposal:

I suggest that we agree on a property name for this (these) concepts and
create it with a range of Text and a suitable, not too specific,
description.

After some use in the real world, we can then review that usage and come up
with enhanced propert(ies) definition, range, etc. as part of a further
following proposal.

At this current stage translating the forgoing discussions in this email
trail into a concise description, that will be understandable to the
Schema,org community that will receive, and hopefully accept, our proposals
seems a challenge too far for this initial release.

~Richard

Richard Wallis
Founder, Data Liberate
http://dataliberate.com
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis
Twitter: @rjw

On 16 February 2018 at 17:39, Nate Otto <nate@ottonomy.net> wrote:

> Thanks for digging in to get more precise on level here.
>
> I like how the SCQF reasons about levels of accomplishment. A Credential
> can recognize a level of accomplishment, a level of performance, or both. A
> Course could be "at" a level of accomplishment in terms of difficulty or
> prerequisite knowledge & skills. These are good use cases to target, and if
> I think of "educationalLevel", this would be the sense of level that would
> fit best, versus "level of performance", even though it would be possible
> to split hairs further between the two categories I started with, which we
> could abbreviate to "accomplishment level recognized" and "accomplishment
> level required".
>
> This vocabulary's ability to describe level of accomplishment should be
> distinct from trying to talk about level of performance and not use the
> same property, in my opinion.
>
> Fritz,
> I'm a little wary of "A string, term or URL". That's amazingly broad to
> the point where it would likely make it very difficult to serve the
> comparison use cases.
>
> What feels important to me about understanding the level of accomplishment
> of a credential is its position relative to other credentials, learning
> opportunities, etc. I am not confident I get that across a range of
> credentials unless they all use specific URLs pointing to level definitions
> like the ones from the SCQF.
>
> On one hand, one string property is nice and simple, on the other hand, it
> doesn't serve comparison use cases well unless all the credentials you'd
> like to compare use a very specific scheme established outside the scope of
> this vocabulary known to the consumer.
>
> Maybe I changed my mind on using alignment, particularly because
> AlignmentObject already has the "alignmentType" property, which includes
> "educationalLevel" as an option. We could suggest something like this,
> adding a numerical levelNumber property and using a URL either for
> educationalFramework or targetUrl (a little wary of targetUrl because I
> would think that should represent a URL of the exact level that alignment
> is desired for, but maybe somebody can ease my mind on this point)
>
> {
> "@context": "http://schema.org",
> "@type": "Credential",
> "alignment": [{
> "educationalFramework": "http://pinballsorcerers.org/levels/2",
> "alignmentType": "educationalLevel",
> "levelNumber": 2
> },
> {
> "educationalFramework": "https://ec.europa.eu/ploteus/
> content/descriptors-page",
> "alignmentType": "educationalLevel",
> "levelNumber": 7
> }
> ]
> }
>
> It does seems like we're not going to be able to model this nearly as well
> to serve comparison use cases with a bare text string. Only human eyeballs
> could make sense of the difference between
>
> "educationalLevel": "Pinball Wizard Level 1: Nub" and "educationalLevel":
> "Pinball Wizard Level 6: Ultimate Extra Baller"
>
> Nate
>
>