Re: [Proposal] schema:OnlineCourse

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 6:19 AM, Barker, Phil A <Phil.Barker@hw.ac.uk>
wrote:

> 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).
>

Can you give an example of this? It may be better to model these as
different types rather than trying to mash them together. The programmes
type could then include the modules.



>
> 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.
>
>
Point taken. I think it is important to designate MOOCs from other courses.
I tend to prefer using subclasses instead of booleans as it is easier to
expand a subclass to include properties I missed the first time around.



> 3. I think it would be better to model an instance of a Course as a
> collection of EducationalEvents and CreativeWorks.
>
>
The integration with Event is one of the places that needs refining.



> 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 where definitions tend to be minimalist.
>
>
Good point. I'll update the description to be more inclusive of other
educational systems.



>
> 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.
>

I'll update the document to include some of the sites I was using for
reference, but they were:

Coursera (The example came from
https://www.coursera.org/course/datascitoolbox)
MIT course catalog (http://student.mit.edu/catalog/m6a.html)
Stanford course catalog (https://explorecourses.stanford.edu)
edX (https://www.edx.org/)
Cambridge Center for Adult Education (http://www.ccae.org/)

- Vicki


Vicki Tardif Holland | Ontologist | vtardif@google.com