schema.org for educational courses

Hello all, this is essentially an invite to get involved with building a 
schema extension for educational courses, by way of a description of 
some of the work so far.

I'm sending this primarily to the schema.org mail list, but cc-ing to 
LRMI and DC-Education where I hope there will also be some interest. (In 
case you don't know, LRMI = Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, part 
of DCMI. I'm a member of the task group, you are welcome to get involved 
if it sounds interesting[1].)

About a year ago there was a flurry of discussion about wanting to 
markup descriptions of courses in schema [2]. Vicky Tardiff-Holland 
produced a proposal [3] which we discussed in LRMI and elsewhere as a 
result of which various suggestions were and comments were added to that 
proposal.

I also led some work in LRMI around scope, use cases, requirements, 
existing data; which I hoped would lead to some validating/refining the 
proposal by some example data that could be used to demonstrate that it 
met the use cases [4].

I am up for another push on courses. I share the doc I was working on 
[4] in the hope that it is good starting point. It's a bit long, so here 
is an overview of what it contains:
*
- scope:* concerning discovery of any type of educational course 
(online/offline, long/short, scheduled/on-demand) Educational course 
defined as "some sequence of events and/or creative works which aims to 
build knowledge, competence or ability of learners". (out of scope: 
information about students and their progression etc; information needed 
internally for course management rather than discovery)

*- comparators*: a review of some established ways of sharing similar data

*- use cases
- requirements arising from the use cases

- mapping to some existing examples*. I used hypothes.is[5] to annotate 
existing web pages that describe different types of course, e.g. from 
Coursera or a University, tagging the requirement that the data was 
relevant to. Here's an example of a page as tagged: 
https://goo.gl/1IWjOh (click on a yellow highlight to show the relevant 
requirement as a comment with a tag)
hypothes.is aggregates the selected information for each tag, to give a 
list of the information relevant to each use case, for example 
https://hypothes.is/stream?q=tag:%27reqC%27

I think the next step would be to review the use cases and requirements 
in light of some of the observations from the mapping, and to look again 
at the proposal to see how it reflects the data available/required. But 
first I want to try to get more people involved, see whether anyone has 
a better idea for how to progress, or if anyone wants to check the work 
so far and help move it forward.

I'm aware the docs and discussions so far around schema for courses are 
a scattered set of scraps and drafts. If there is enough interest it 
would be really useful to have it in one place.

Phil

1. Task group at http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/AB-Comm/ed/LRMI/TG 
, specs at http://dublincore.org/dcx/lrmi-terms/1.1/ and general info at 
http://www.lrmi.net/
2. See issue 195 on github https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/195
3. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YWjLzZC8FiTiOwSAETRIEozeqZdn6O8a4fgqK4t5Ss/edit#
4. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-s5HjNkWUtIoLAHjRcUZljBWEdHQIupk-KscAEIbFA/edit#
5. https://hypothes.is/

-- 
Phil Barker           @philbarker
LRMI, Cetis, ICBLhttp://people.pjjk.net/phil
Heriot-Watt University

Workflow:http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/workflow/



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