Re: Spam Low: Should we drop CourseOffering [was Re: Modelling Course and CourseOffering

Hi Tavis;
Regarding your comment: "My suggestion would be that CourseOffering is optional; clearly some courses do not have offerings in that sense (like the Lynda.com courses)."I don't think CourseOffering (a.k.a. CourseSection from the U.S. standard) is optional as far as the standard goes; although, for implementation, in a sense everything is optional. Even if the Lynda.com only offers one instance, some of the CourseOffering properties would still apply, as would the object structure of Course has 0 or more CourseOfferings. What would be optional/irrelevant are specific properties such as start and end dates. In the Lynda.com example there would still be a Course object and one instance of CourseSection with the isVirtual 
attribute set to TRUE and perhaps some other useful properties from Product such as AggregateRating . I'm not sure in that case if the Lynda.com "Author" is the CourseSection/instructor or the Course/CreativeWork/author maybe both.
Jim

      From: "Developer, SleepingDog" <developer@sleepingdog.org.uk>
 To: public-schema-course-extend@w3.org 
 Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 2:24 PM
 Subject: Re: Spam Low: Should we drop CourseOffering [was Re: Modelling Course and CourseOffering
   
Hi all

From my own tiny part of the globe, Scottish Further Education, CourseOffering/Presentation has if anything become more significant due to a round of government-sponsored College mergers. This has resulted in larger College (or groups of Colleges sharing the same curriculum/prospectus) responsible for geographical regions. Within these regions, the same course is often offered at different locations at various times during the same year, so that students can attend (more) locally.

I don’t have a national breakdown, but out of 353 courses our College currently runs, 132 have no CourseOfferings (nothing to apply to), 114 have one, and 107 have more than one CourseOffering.

One particular difference in these CourseOffering properties, as in the HNC Accounting example, is that some of these are full-time day courses, while others are evening classes (which appear in our site search terms). We have also offered courses on day-release, distance-learning and at weekends. These variants will be highly significant for course searchers fitting a course around their lives.

Looking around other Colleges, you can see the same pattern:

https://dundeeandangus.ac.uk/courses/finder/course/1062/hnc-accounting
https://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/courses/hnc-accounting
http://www.westcollegescotland.ac.uk/courses/course-directory/courses/business-administration-accounting/hnc-accounting

I am, of course, wary of generalising from these localised instances. I would note that traditional universities, in my experience, have a relatively simple course model that does not generalize well to other institutional and web-based course providers. During the XCRI project, for example, vocational college input was sought out to make the standard more robust and flexible.

More globally, there are courses like ECDL/ICDL which have apparently the same curricula (not just qualification) but are offered by different institutions.

Some organizations offer the same courses in different languages. The W3CDevCampus offers some courses in English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish:
http://www.w3devcampus.com/courses/

Many people take such online courses in a language that is not their first or native one. It would be valuable for them to see variant language offerings in any search results (although in this case it looks likely that these CourseOfferings will be on different web pages).

My suggestion would be that CourseOffering is optional; clearly some courses do not have offerings in that sense (like the Lynda.com courses).

As I mentioned before, I think there is great value in having a course search result which displays these CourseOfferings in a list just as the HNC Accounting example:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hnc+accounting
Pages - Course Details : HNC Accounting - Fife College
www.fife.ac.uk/student/courses/course/HCACC
This course is designed for those wishing to take up a career in Accounting and Financial Administration within a range of organisations. Both HNC and HND ...
29 Aug 2016 - 23 Jun 2017    Full Time    Halbeath Campus ...
31 Aug 2016 - 21 Jun 2017    Evenings only and ...    St Brycedale Campus …

In the W3CDevCampus example, the search result might show a HTML5 course offered (listed) at certain times in English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. This might need some kind of same-as relationship.

After all, it is the search behaviour that we are looking to improve.

However, we seem to be lacking some empirical statistical evidence to make any decision clearer. Have I missed something? Unfortunately, I do not have access at the moment to my College’s search engine tools, otherwise I guess something like Google’s sector search benchmarking might help.


Tavis Reddick


> On 11 Feb 2016, at 18:33, Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> Your comments please...
> 
> 
> Proposal: should we drop CourseOffering (AKA CourseSection) as a separate type from Course, and see how we fare without it. We can add it back later if we find we need it. We define Course in such a way that the properties currently discussed as relating to CourseOffering become properties of Course.
> 
> Course 
> "defintion: a sequence of events and/or creative works that aims to build the knowledge, competence or ability of learners, and that may be offered at a specific time and place, or through specific mode of study."
> 
> Rationale:
> 
> On 10/02/16 15:48, Alan Paull wrote: