Re: Course, a new dawn?

I agree with (+1) Vicki and Dan that there is a requirement to model abstract courses that are not events; which in turn may have zero, one or more event-based offerings (possibly simultaneously, overlapping, sequentially) with properties whose distinctiveness will be important for learners.

In markup terms, I expect this to be typically realized by a course details page which contains a set of (often descriptive) abstract course elements which apply to all offerings, and an optional set of offerings which have properties specific to them.

I am not familiar enough with schema.org best practice to say how this should be achieved, and nor do I want to rule out a pattern that represents courses as abstraction-only or as creative works (like a learning object), or a one-off course which occurs as one event. But I can say that all of the three student record systems I have worked on extracting course information with, and all of the course modelling standards I have encountered have had a (parent) abstract course and a (child) concrete offering structure.

Tavis Reddick

> On 25 Feb 2016, at 18:33, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com> wrote:
> 
> On 25 February 2016 at 18:23, Vicki Tardif Holland <vtardif@google.com> wrote:
>> I am concerned that in the name of simplicity, we are losing the ability to
>> understand the various things a Course may be:
>> 
>> 1. The abstract notion (e.g. "HNC Accounting").
>> 2. A specific session of the Course (e.g. HNC Accounting taught at St
>> Brycedale Campus Kirkcaldy starting 2016-08-29).
>> 3. An offer to sell access to a Course. In the online world, this is usually
>> a specific session.
>> 
>> As the examples are written, I cannot tell the difference between
>> definitions 1) and 2), particularly because the first example gives dates.
>> - Vicki
> 
> +1 …Courses do indeed have
> aspects (especially their syllabus) which are closer to documents, and
> aspects which are closer to events, but we lose too much by flattening
> everything into a single Course type that subclasses both.…
> --Dan
>

Received on Thursday, 25 February 2016 19:31:07 UTC