Re: Modelling Course and CourseOffering

Phil et al,

Great dialog so far! Allow me to offer a couple of notes on the open
questions:

Phil wrote:

> Open for discussion:
> - should Course be a subtype of Intangible or CreativeWork?

This can be argued either way with validity depending on your scope of
definition of a course. I would recommend Intangible to take the more
inclusive perspective of a course and course offering. I consider courses
that are mainly experiential such as Intermediary Wine Tasting or Advanced
Meditation Practice/Lab, etc. There are a whole class of courses (pardon
the pun) that are about doing rather then show and tell. Furthermore those
that are more about show and tell often aggregate a collection of different
creative works and then apply a collaborative discussion, evaluation or
critique process as group on those works. That feels rather intangible to
me.

> - is there a need for a separate type for the instantiation?

Is there a strong reason to separate this? Seems cleaner to not if we don;t
have a strong reason to, and I don't have one to offer.

  --if there is need, can we agree to call it a CourseOffering?

That seems like a ok name if we need it, but US K-12 noremallt talks abotu
a course and a course section (With an instructor, schedule, syllabus,
set of learning expectations (aka competencies) and requirements, etc.).
But why not simply list all the "Course Sections" with the course and their
related section specific information? Maybe that is what the sub-type is
needed for?

FWIW,

Joshua Marks

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 5:02 AM, Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hello all,
> I asked for comments on the use cases, scope description and definition of
> an educational course [1]. There have been some suggested new use cases and
> clarification of the scope with respect to aggregations of courses. I have
> updated the pages on the wiki accordingly. Nudge me if I have forgotten
> anything or not captured your meaning. If you have any other comment please
> add them to that thread, but the general shape seems uncontroversial so I
> would like to start a couple of new discussion threads for how to meet
> requirements arising from the use cases.
>
> The first of these is around the modelling of courses and course
> offerings. This is tricky. There have been discussions in a couple of
> places at least: on Vicki's Google doc proposal [2] and Wes's pull request
> [3].
>
> Consensus seems limited at the moment to
> - we need a schema.org type: Course
> - there are abstract and concrete aspects of courses, i.e. the (abstract )
> thing that is offered year after year and instantiations of it that run
> between set dates and at set locations (on- or offline)
>
> Open for discussion:
> - should Course be a subtype of Intangible or CreativeWork
> - is there a need for a separate type for the instantiation?
>   --if there is need, can we agree to call it a CourseOffering?
>
>
> I propose that we continue the discussion here, but in order to make
> progress pending an outcome to that discussion (and in the hope of
> informing the discussion with real world examples) we try the following:
> - work with a model that has two new types Course and CourseOffering
> - we do not assume any parent for these types yet, but we do try to meet
> requirements by drawing in properties from other types already in
> schema.org rather than create new ones. For example, if we want to know
> what a course is about we use the existing 'about' property form
> CreativeWork, if we want to know when a CourseOffering runs we use might
> find something in Event.
>
> At the end of the process we will know what schema type a Course and
> CourseOffering most looks like, which would be one factor in deciding what
> it should be a subtype of. We will also know whether they look
> substantially different.
>
>
> Do you think that will work?
>
> Phil
>
> 1.
> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-schema-course-extend/2016Feb/att-0001/00-part
> 2.
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YWjLzZC8FiTiOwSAETRIEozeqZdn6O8a4fgqK4t5Ss/edit
> 3. https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/pull/972#issuecomment-173560886
> & following comments
>
> --
> Phil Barker           @philbarker
> LRMI, Cetis, ICBL     http://people.pjjk.net/phil
> Heriot-Watt University
>
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