Proposed standard for Career Clusters in the LR
Jerome Grimmer
Here at Illinois workNet/Illinois Pathways, we have been steadily churning on extracting data from the Learning Registry and importing it into a searchable database. We’ve also been working on our publishing tool, and would like to propose a way to indicate that a resource is useful for one or more career clusters in the Learning Registry.
With the existing structure of data in the LR, we believe it would be appropriate to store the career clusters in keywords. By storing it in keywords, it avoids having to extend schemas such as LOM and NSDL, while also allowing career clusters to come in attached to paradata in addition to metadata. We recognize that the LR is an international effort, and that each country may have different career clusters. We also recognize that, like Illinois, states and provinces within each country may have local career clusters which are not recognized on the national level.
National career clusters shall be formatted in the following way within keywords and use the national government’s recognized names:
“keys”: [
“CC_CareerCluster: name”,
“CC_CareerCluster: name”,
“CC_CareerCluster: name”,
…]
CC is the two digit ISO code for the country (e.g. “DE” for Germany, “UK” for the United Kingdom, “CA” for Canada, “US” for United States, etc…).
Local career clusters shall be formatted in the following way within keywords and should use the local government’s recognized names:
“keys”:[
“CC-LL_CareerCluster: name”,
“CC-LL_CareerCluster: name”,
“CC-LL_CareerCluster: name”,
…]
The CC is again the two digit ISO code for the country, and LL is the accepted abbreviation (which MAY be more than two characters long but MUST NOT contain spaces) for the state. Within the United States, LL MUST be the abbreviations used by the USPS. Other countries have the option of creating their own standard set of abbreviations for the states and provinces within their borders. Formatting local career clusters in this fashion avoids conflicts where one region’s commonly used abbreviation overlaps another region’s (or country’s) abbreviation. For example, Canada has an ISO code of “CA”, which is also commonly used for California in the US. By letting Canada use “CA” and having California use “US-CA” this is avoided.
For example, if a resource is useful for the US career cluster of “Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources” and also for the Illinois career cluster “Energy”, the keys for career cluster would be formatted this way:
“keys”:[
“US_CareerCluster: Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources”,
“US-IL_CareerCluster: Energy”
]
I realize this is not terribly formal but once this has been discussed we can create a more formal document detailing how career clusters can be stored in the LR. Please comment.
Jerome Grimmer
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
2450 Foundation Drive Suite 100
Springfield, IL
Phone: 217-786-3010 ext. 5857
Toll-free: 1-800-252-4822 ext. 5857
NOTE: My E-mail address has changed
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