Re: schema.org for educational courses

(thanks for the update, Phil!)

On Fri, 4 Dec 2015 at 15:38 Vicki Tardif Holland <vtardif@google.com> wrote:

> Given there are multiple documents and email threads, is there a preferred
> way to send comments?
>

>From a schema.org perspective, it is important to have a forum where anyone
can participate, and where discussions are properly archived. I suggest we
create a tightly scoped W3C Community Group focussed explicitly on
improving schema.org for description of courses. This does naturally touch
on various related areas - which is exactly why a public forum is needed -
but let's keep a tight scope as there are plenty of existing places (like
for more general discussion about educational metadata.

I like the scope description in the doc has been working on -
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-s5HjNkWUtIoLAHjRcUZljBWEdHQIupk-KscAEIbFA/edit#
-
and which was summarized below as...

"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)"

This doesn't directly answer Vicki's question: where to send comments. It
is more about workflow for making sure all the discussion and commenting
eventually feeds into improvements to schema.org. I suggest we make sure
that each document has someone taking a lead, and that the document
authors/editors can find their own balance between inline comments vs
github/email.

Another way of avoiding fragmentation in discussions is for us to
collectively focus our attention in the same direction (rather than debate
gmail vs google docs vs email vs wikis etc.). At the present time I think
the requirements/usecases doc is a good place for us all to be looking:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-s5HjNkWUtIoLAHjRcUZljBWEdHQIupk-KscAEIbFA/edit#

Dan



>
> - Vicki
>
> Vicki Tardif Holland | Ontologist | vtardif@google.com
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 4:32 AM, Phil Barker <phil.barker@hw.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> 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>
>> 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, ICBL     http://people.pjjk.net/phil
>> Heriot-Watt University
>>
>> Workflow: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/workflow/
>>
>>
>>
>>
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