Re: Schemas

Justin, some time ago I noticed that same lack of vocabulary coverage and opened a conversation on building out an extension for online courses.  This conversation fizzled, so I'm glad you've raised the issue again.

That there are (evolving) schemas with seemingly "obscure" items like ExercisePlan is due in large part to the excellent work of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative [1], lead by the Association of Educational Publishers and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation [2].

This highlights the fact that the best route to building accepted extensions is through formal collaborative vocabulary featuring key players in the industry to which an extension applies (the same principle is true of the health and medical vocabulary that has been integrated into schema.org [3]).

It seems to me the - especially with the rapidly rising popularity of MOOC [4] initiatives like Coursea [5] - that this is perfect time to bring together elearning professionals to collaboratively to work on a metadata initiative along the lines of LMRI for online courses and related aspects of distance education (with the added benefit - as per the principle of vocabulary reuse is a good thing) that such an initiative can in part build on LMRI work where it is relevant).


I haven't had the time to take much of a organizational role here, but I invite you and any other list members involved in online education to contact me directly if the will exists to work on such a collaborative vocabulary-building initiative.


Thanks,
Aaron Bradley


[1] http://www.lrmi.net/

[2] http://www.lrmi.net/about
[3] http://blog.schema.org/2012/06/health-and-medical-vocabulary-for.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
[5] https://www.coursera.org/


----- Original Message -----
> From: Justin Leoni <justin@nextknowledge.com>
> To: public-vocabs@w3.org
> Cc: 
> Sent: Monday, October 29, 2012 8:18:27 AM
> Subject: Schemas
> 
>T o whom it may concern,
> 
> With the constant evolution in Internet technologies and the need now for a 
> schema based layout for better results when dealing with organic searches.  I 
> find it hard to believe that there is no schema for online courses / training.
> 
> There are 1000's of schema provided for obscure things like ExercisePlan but 
> not for an educational unit.  This should contain things like.
> 
> Course Name
> Course Length
> Course Description
> Learning Objective
> CEU Value
> Course Author
> Certificate
> 
> Etc.
> 
> Justin Leoni
>

Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 19:12:19 UTC