What should be in Course 1.0?

Reacting to other threads in this area can I offer a little pragmatic
advice.

Much of the successful work in expanding and extending Schema and its
extensions has been based upon taking core principles, types, properties,
usage etc. for an area, then iteratively building upon them as and when
required, needed, or understood.  The later work building on the practical
usage, and modelling popularity, of what has been laid down previously.

My feeling is that we are already delving far too deep in some areas -
course structure for example - to have any confidence in how, or indeed if,
what we are discussing will be generally used in the future.

Remembering the prime purpose of Schema markup is to share information in a
generic way to help potential students, in this case, discover courses that
might meet their requirements, and be directed to their full descriptions
on provider’s sites.

Our process being that we draw together a proposal and submit it for review
and acceptance by the Schema steering group, the more detailed and complex
it is, the more convincing they will need regarding that complexity plus
the more positive indications towards broad potential adoption will be
required.

It is a fairly easy argument to suggest Course & CourseInstance will be
taken up by a potentially large number of academic institutions of all
types. How many will be inspired to, or capable of, publishing their course
structures at the same time is a very different question.

My recommendation is that we step back for a moment and identify what would
be in a 1.0 proposal - complete and submit that in the near future.  Such
an addition to Schema would be a major step forward from where we are now.

Moving on to a more detailed version 2.0, taking into account to reactions,
feedback, and compromises we may have to make submitting 1.0 this should be
overall a smother process.

One final thought.  A basic (1.0) Course proposal may well fit best into
the core Schema.org vocabulary, with education extensions adding domain
specific capability later.

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