RE: [Proposal] schema:OnlineCourse

(with apologies for top posting. this email client doesn't handle inline comments at all well)

1. Courses in courses: is/hasPartOf may be too generic. There may be other things that are part of a course (in some people's minds). But it may be that's not a problem if the correct relationship can safely be inferred from the fact that both object and subject (i.e. the part and the aggregate of parts) are Courses.

2. OnlineCourses & MOOCs. Yes, if the use cases give a special emphasis on MOOCs (which seems a timely use case) there is a need to indicate that a course is a MOOC. Having a class of OnlineCourses doesn't do this, as some online courses are neither massive nor open.

Thanks for the rest.

Phil


________________________________
From: Wes Turner [wes.turner@gmail.com]
Sent: 16 December 2014 12:56
To: Barker, Phil A
Cc: Vicki Tardif Holland; GUANGYUAN PIAO; Thad Guidry; Aaron Bradley; Public Vocabs
Subject: Re: [Proposal] schema:OnlineCourse

> 1. Courses can comprise Courses. This is especially important at Universities that recruit into and award certificates for programmes (Courses) that are built from modules (Courses).

Is this satisfied by http://schema.org/isPartOf , or is there a need for a more specific property?

> 2. I don't think there is much to be gained from having a separate class on OnlineCourse rather than a property of a Course to flag whether it is online or not. I  think the properties you have for OnlineCourse also apply to regular courses. Most regular courses have an online component.

So long as there is something to indicate that a Course is a "MOOC".

> 3. I think it would be better to model an instance of a Course as a collection of EducationalEvents and CreativeWorks.

This could indeed be useful for e.g. modeling a Syllabus.

Use Case: I've been thinking about how to express a curriculum set with/as RDFa. I have a number of PDFs; and I have a number of wikipedia topic/concept links which are advantageous in that they are translated conceptual identifiers, in dbpedia. These could be 'educationalAlignment' 'AlignmentObject.targetURL' s, if they were an 'established educational framework.' [1][2] ... How do I legitimize this with parenthetical notations and necessary RDFa?

In consultation with the authors of SKOS about adding prefPluralLabel (not likely, in the near future), I learned about http://rdf-vocabulary.ddialliance.org/xkos.html , which demonstrates usage of rdf:List ; which would be useful for expressing an ordered set of syllabi things that have URIs and metadata.

> 4. [normative epistemiology: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/learning-formal/ ]

"Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in [his] own way." -- Chomsky


> [...] do you have some usecases in mind and target example websites? It's difficult to assess whether these properties are sufficient and realistic without those.

If you have the time to dig through, this thread [3] lists a number of hypothetical and actual use cases:


  *   http://www.edumine.com/
  *   http://www.ieee.org/portal/innovate/products/educational/
  *   https://www.futurelearn.com/
  *   https://www.udacity.com/
  *   https://www.edx.org/
  *   https://www.coursera.org/
  *   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_systems
  *   [University] Course Catalogs contain prerequisites and matriculation requirements
  *   US Primary education standards: http://www.corestandards.org/ "Common Core"
     *   This could potentially be extremely useful for discovering useful curriculum resources
  *   https://developers.google.com/edu/curriculumsearch/ (educationalAlignment -> "Course")

  *   Src: https://github.com/edx/
  *   Src: https://github.com/classcentral/class-central/tree/master/src/ClassCentral/SiteBundle/Entity

[1] https://westurner.github.io/redditlog/#comment/ci3c1o3
[2] https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/knowledge-engineering.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2014Feb/0131.html


On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 5:19 AM, Barker, Phil A <Phil.Barker@hw.ac.uk<mailto:Phil.Barker@hw.ac.uk>> wrote:

Vicki, thanks for the heads up, I would have missed this otherwise.

I have added some comments to the Google Doc, the most significant are:

1. Courses can comprise Courses. This is especially important at Universities that recruit into and award certificates for programmes (Courses) that are built from modules (Courses).

2. I don't think there is much to be gained from having a separate class on OnlineCourse rather than a property of a Course to flag whether it is online or not. I  think the properties you have for OnlineCourse also apply to regular courses. Most regular courses have an online component.

3. I think it would be better to model an instance of a Course as a collection of EducationalEvents and CreativeWorks.

4. Language is difficult. The different usage between UK and US English is one thing, but more importantly commonly used terms often relate to specific education systems or pedagogies. So phrases like "instructors deliver lessons to students" implies a particular pedagogy. Also this means that common terms become ambiguous and open to misinterpretation in international use, e.g. class, course, programme, module. This is important in schema.org<http://schema.org> where definitions tend to be minimalist.

Hope this helps.

As a general question, do you have some usecases in mind and target example websites? It's difficult to assess whether these properties are sufficient and realistic without those.

Phil


________________________________
From: Vicki Tardif Holland [vtardif@google.com<mailto:vtardif@google.com>]
Sent: 15 December 2014 18:40
To: Wes Turner
Cc: GUANGYUAN PIAO; Thad Guidry; Aaron Bradley; Public Vocabs
Subject: Re: [Proposal] schema:OnlineCourse

(I commented on GitHub, but I am not sure if everyone is over there, so I am duplicating the message here.)

I have read through all of the comments and background links and attempted to pull the various ideas into a cohesive whole. My thoughts are still rather preliminary, but can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YWjLzZC8FiTiOwSAETRIEozeqZdn6O8a4fgqK4t5Ss/edit?usp=sharing

It would be nice to be able to support in-person classes (academic or not) and MOOCs.

Please comment here or on GitHub.

- Vicki


Vicki Tardif Holland | Ontologist | vtardif@google.com<mailto:vtardif@google.com>


On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com<mailto:wes.turner@gmail.com>> wrote:
I've created a GitHub issue ticket for this Proposal:

https://github.com/rvguha/schemaorg/issues/195

cc'ing a comment here, because DRY:

What is missing or could be added?
>From http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2014Feb/0127.html :
Properties:

  *   derivedFrom/previousIncantation property could also be helpful.

  *   prerequisitve/buildsUpon/suggestedPrerequisite properties would be great.


Types for these properties would need to be <Course>.
... This would then form a graph of Courses and/or OnlineCourses.

It may be most helpful to transition discussion to a task-focused GitHub issue.

On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 10:16 PM, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com<mailto:wes.turner@gmail.com>> wrote:
In creating said ticket [openbadges/openbadges-specifiation/9], I'm having trouble linking to the entirety of a mailing list thread (who know).

Is there / should there be an issue for OnlineCourse here: https://github.com/rvguha/schemaorg/issues ?




On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 10:10 PM, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com<mailto:wes.turner@gmail.com>> wrote:
I've opened a ticket with the OpenBadges specification project: https://github.com/openbadges/openbadges-specification/issues/9

> How could/should we reference badges offered by a schema.org/OnlineCourse<http://schema.org/OnlineCourse> ?

> We could point to just URIs, but then we'd need to lookup badge titles.

> Would it be feasible to create schema.org/Badge<http://schema.org/Badge> ?

On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 9:52 PM, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com<mailto:wes.turner@gmail.com>> wrote:


On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 3:11 PM, GUANGYUAN PIAO <parklize@gmail.com<mailto:parklize@gmail.com>> wrote:
1. Is it worth adding a "prerequisiteCourse" property to list the prerequisites for the given course?
    - IMO, "prerequisiteCourse" or "requirements" for the Course could provide rich snippets for users to know if it is appropriate for him/her.

Where can I add topical links to wikipedia (dbpedia [1])? e.g. This course is about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

[1] http://lod-cloud.net/

2. Can we change "isCertificateAvailable" from a boolean to something with a little more data? Maybe the type of certificate granted or the institution granting the certificate?
    - +1, and then it will need Certificate type and additional properties to think about.


http://openbadges.org/ are gaining momentum. [2]

Would "credential" be a more generic predicate?

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Open_Badges
[3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges
[4] https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges#mozilla-open-badges
[5] https://github.com/openbadges/openbadges-specification/blob/master/Assertion/latest.md (JSON Web Signatures)


--
Wes Turner
https://westurner.github.io/



--
Wes Turner
https://westurner.github.io/



--
Wes Turner
https://westurner.github.io/




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----- 
We invite research leaders and ambitious early career researchers to 
join us in leading and driving research in key inter-disciplinary themes. 
Please see www.hw.ac.uk/researchleaders for further information and how
to apply.

Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity
registered under charity number SC000278.