RE: Course, a new dawn?

I'm not sure that I agree.  Under Phil's suggestion we can have coursePresentation (multiples) to hold specific Event style information, eg startDate, duration, price.  So we can still differentiate the abstract course and the concrete presentation, if we want to (but we don’t have to).  We can still model the abstract courses that are not events.

The examples in my previous email showed an OU qualification (abstract), and an OU module (some abstract, some concrete bits).

I may be missing something critical?!

Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: Developer, SleepingDog [mailto:developer@sleepingdog.org.uk] 
Sent: 25 February 2016 19:30
To: public-schema-course-extend@w3.org
Subject: 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 Friday, 26 February 2016 10:57:12 UTC