Any chance of a "course" type at schema.org?

[Ruben]

Hello, 

I have started reading on RDF and the semantic web just yesterday and I have been reading about scherma.org and LRMI today, because I am creating a website that will list publicly available online courses, paid online courses and paid offline courses in a 'brick and mortar' location. 

I bumped into this interesting list message a couple of hours ago and since then I have been reading your website and I have tried to find out if I can expect meta data types at schema.org for the data I am displaying on my website in the near future.

This is the list message I am referring to: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012May/0007.html

What I would need is exactly what "Aaron" is describing in his message. I would need a "course" type and perhaps an "online course" type.

I hope I am barking up the right tree here. I would really appreciate if you could tell me if your efforts are geared towards these new types at schema.org.

[Steve Midgley]

Hi Ruben,

Not being a definitive expert on LRMI by any means, I'll give an answer a try.. I think courses are more like "events" than learning resources.. But that said, they bear some properties in common with learning resources and having a "type" or "category" is one of them. I'd be curious to know more about what kinds of "course types" you are planning to offer, but if they are like a course catalog then you might use the alignmentObject to connect your course with your course catalog:

4012 - Anthropology

4012-101 - Introduction to Anthropology

4012-306 - Advanced studies of urban cultures

etc

Then you publish those as URLs:

www.uni.edu/course-catalog/4012-101

www.uni.edu/course-catalog/4012-306

And return info about the course catalog in human readable and schema.org data at those end-points.

Then on your course pages, include an alignmentObject that points to those URLs in targetURL..

That'd be my suggestion for solving this problem, but I'll be curious if anyone has a better way or concerns about this approach.

Best,

Steve

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[Joshua Marks]

Rubin,

 

A “Course” is a learningResrouceType, just like “presentation”, “handout”, “activity” or “unit of instruction”. It can be both a Creative Work and an Event from the Schema perspective. In additional LRMI value for typicalAgeRange, timeRequired, educaitnoalUse, and educationalAlignment also apply.

 

Now Steve’s suggestion to use educationalAlignment to align to a course catalog framework is something that was not discussion, but would be a reasonable use of alignment.

 

Joshua Marks

CTO

Curriki: The Global Education and Learning Community

jma...@curriki.org

www.curriki.org

 

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[Aaron Bradley]

A course is not a "Creative Work" because it is not a distinct unit like the "books, movies, photographs, software programs" used as examples by the specifications, nor the "presentation", "handout", "activity" or "unit of instruction".

Nor is it an "Event" from a Schema perspective, because this is defined as a "event happening at a certain time at a certain location."  An brick-and-mortar course takes place over a range of defined times; an online course may or may take place at a certain time, and does not take place at a certain location.

In other words, a course is made of up of resources that are delivered over a period of time, and may have numerous other dimensions for which no current schema.org types or properties are available, such as the instructor teaching a course, course credits, the type of artifact that against with course credits can be applied (diploma, certificate, degree, etc.), and the accrediting institution.

This is to take nothing away from the fine work of the LRMI in successfully defining learning resources and incorporating them into the vocabulary, but to say that these new properties are inadequate for accurately and meaningfully describing either online or brick-and-mortar courses

[Joshua Marks]

Aaron,

 

You make a strong argument for why a new Thing in schema might be warranted for a course, although I think functionally treating it as a CreativeWork is sufficient. The LRMI attributes has to be placed some place in Schema, and for the most part learning resources are creative works of some type. I would also suggest that even though not distinct, the unique collection and sequencing of materials and learning processes in a course is in fact a creative work. So is there utility in extending Schema for this use? That is for Dan I think.

 

WRT Events, it is defined with a duration and time range (Start and finish) and a location (place). Now a “Place” might also define a virtual/on-line location for an online course, but this is not part of the place of an event right now, only geolocation of physical places is (This is something that might be updated in the Place properties). So again, functionally, Event together with CreativeWork might get the job done for the time and duration descriptions as well as the learning resources/context description of the course?  

 

Joshua Marks

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Curriki: The Global Education and Learning Community

jma...@curriki.org

www.curriki.org

 

 

I welcome you to become a member of the Curriki community, to follow us on Twitter and to say hello on our blog, Facebook and LinkedIn communities.

 

From: lr...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lr...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Aaron Bradley
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 10:39 AM
To: lr...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Any chance of a "course" type at schema.org?

 

A course is not a "Creative Work" because it is not a distinct unit like the "books, movies, photographs, software programs" used as examples by the specifications, nor the "presentation", "handout", "activity" or "unit of instruction".

--

[Steve Midgley]

I guess it depends on how you define a course.

1) Is it a series of scheduled events that occur periodically over range of dates? (like a "normal" university course)

2) Or is it an unknown set of activities over a range of dates? (like a self-study writer's course)

The former is hard to represent because it's more than a single event - it's a string of events.

The latter is easier b/c it's just a "long running" single event that takes place over some period of (say) months.

If you can live with defining #1 as "Anthro 101: Jan 27-May 16" then it seems like it can fit into schema.org/lrmi as an Event. 

But if you actually want to talk about #1 as a recurring set of events like "Anthro 101: Jan 27-May 16, every Tu 3pm-6pm (Room 201 Kroeber hall), Thu 3-5pm (Room 305 Dwinelle), Fri (lab) 8am-9am (Museum basement)" that seems pretty hard, especially when you have exceptions and reschedules for special dates and changes in locations or whatever. ICAL seems to support complex recurrence similar to this (but not so much with exceptions) but I'm not aware of any movement to include that level of schedule complexity into schema.org?

HTH,

Steve

[Aaron Bradley]

Thanks for weighing in Jason and Steve.

I think Steve has hit on some of the key issues, especially in his last example.  And that example also shows how potentially useful this sort of extension could be.  Imagine being able to ask and get decent answers for some of these queries:

- Where I can find online courses on anthropology?
- Where I can a find a photography course that takes place weeknights in Seattle?
- Are there courses I can take in Leeds to put toward my MBA?

And so on.

Speaking as one that has made pretty valiant efforts at marking up both online courses (well, I thought they were valiant:), and even seemingly "simple" single educational events like Steve's first example, I can tell you that both the CreativeWork and Event types fall short - in large part because, again, there are both temporal and static dimensions to a "course".

Just to take the example of a course's instructor or teacher:  "author" is a bit limiting and may be inaccurate for CreativeWork, because a course's instructor isn't necessarily its author; just the correct property for an EducationEvent presenter - "performer" - I think speaks to how the Event type is also ill-suited to the task at hand.

All of this somewhat ironic, as - thanks to the rollout of LRMI properties - we can now say lots about a textbook that's required for a course ... but we can't clearly say it's required for a course. :)

Jason, as to your question as to whether or not there's "utility in extending Schema for this use" I think that's for Dan to adjudicate once the case has actually been well made (I certainly don't claim to have done so).  Certainly if there was a similarly well-organized and motivated group in the realm of (both brick-and-mortar and online) education akin to the AEP that could put their brains behind an initiative akin to LRMI, I think that well-made case would exist.

For better or worse, schema.org extensions aren't, in my experience at least, driven so much by their generalized utility as the use-case presented for an extension and - especially (and not particularly unreasonably) the heft of those proposing them.  That at least is the pattern we've seen with the health and medical extensions (led by "US NCBI, physicians at Harvard, Duke and other institutions"), job postings (various US government agencies - including the office of the Whitehouse) and GoodRelations integration (alright, that was chiefly Martin Hepp - but he's like a one-man office of technology:).

[Phil Barker]

In Europe a model and schema for information about courses exists, namely the Metadata for Learning Opportunities - Advertising. In the UK this is used as XCRI-CAP (exchanging course related information, course advertising profile) feeds.
http://www.cen-ltso.net/Main.aspx?put=1042
http://www.xcri.co.uk/
They model issues such as the distinction between a course as an abstract entity offered over many years (Physics 101 at Poppleton University) and the instantiation of the course in a particular year, also the distinction between a course offering and the qualification gained.  They only go to a certain level of detail, e.g. not as far as timetabling, they won't tell a student where the should be for their 10:15 seminar.

Either of these may provide a starting point for describing courses in schema.org

Phil

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[Joshua Marks]

Phil et al,

 

There is something similar here is the US called CEDS, the Common Education Data Standards project. This model has a few variant definitions for a course in K12, post  secondary and under Career and Technical Education -> https://ceds.ed.gov/dataModelEntities.aspx .

 

This model expresses relationships between students, teachers, courses, sections, programs, resources, assessments and learning standards (And more). Others on this thread can say much more about CEDS.

 

Joshua Marks

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From: lr...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lr...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Phil Barker
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2013 3:36 AM
To: lr...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Any chance of a "course" type at schema.org?

 

[Jim Goodell]

To Steve and Joshua's points, in the context of LRMI a "course" is a resource (content) for and about a course, e.g. a set of documents, that defines a course, and "lesson" is content that defines a lesson.  If we are looking at a course through a lens other than learning resources there are other standards/models and vocabularies.

In CEDS the vocabulary for Learning Resource Type includes "Course."  It currently also includes things like "handout" but we are getting feedback from a broad group of stakeholders that they have adopted a fewer set of options that keep it apple-apple.  It gets confusing when you have vocabulary on multiple dimensions within one option set, e.g. there is ambiguity when using options like "handout,"  some will tag that as "handout", some as "Printed", some as (content for) an "Activity", some as "Kinesthetic", or as "Worksheet".  A community of practice of state education agencies in the U.S. have agreed to use only Course, Unit, Lesson, Activity, Assessment, Assessment Item, Assessment Asset, Other.  The idea is that the option is applies-to-apples on one dimension, i.e. the applicable granularity of the content.    LRMI and CEDS have other attributes like media type that handles the other dimensions, e.g. to say it is a "Pamphlet".   There is more work to be done to optimize/standardize vocabularies.

[Ruben]

Hello everyone,

My apologies for responding so late. I had some urgent matters to take care of. And thanks for your responses. Very interesting indeed.

Let me give a little more background on the website I am building.

My website's main goal is to list courses that are offered commercially by companies in my country. So I am not offering the actual courses, but course descriptions. These listings could also be seen as Product listings in the schema.org vocabulary, but I think a more specific type for representing courses would be better.

Besides these paid courses I will also list interesting courses that I find online and that I will in part write myself. These can be seen as something between an actual online course and schema.org's TechArticle.

Steve, I have looked into your suggestion about the alignmentObject term, but I don't really understand the true meaning of alignmentObject. It's a bit abstract. 

I agree with Joshua that a Course can be seen as an Event and that it has some elements of a CreativeWork, but I agree with Aaron that both of these terms are not totally correct.

I would say a Course has Date/Time information like an event and that it could contain a listing of CreativeWorks for the learning materials that are used (video, textbooks, etc).

I am going to read up on Phil's 'Metadata for Learning Opportunities' suggestion and Joshua's remarks on CEDS. It would definitely be an interesting idea to find a starting point for a schema.org definition.

Thanks again for sharing your ideas.

[Scott Whigham]

I was searching today for a "Course" at Schema.org and found my way to this group and this post. I read the above with great interest - lots of good points and info!

I'd like to say that the definition of "Course" that's been presented thus far seems very outdated. Steve wrote, "I think courses are more like "events" than learning resources." Joshua said, "A “Course”... can be both a Creative Work and an Event from the Schema perspective." Aaaron said, "A course is not a "Creative Work" because it is not a distinct unit like the "books, movies, photographs, software programs" used as examples by the specifications..."

This is a very specific definition/interpretation - in the above, a "course" represents:

•     Something created for learning
•     Held at a specific time
•     Attended by students
•     Taught by an "instructor" who may or may not be the "author"
•     Student takes entire course in one stretch

It's almost like there's a one-to-many definition between the "course" and an execution of the course:

•     A "course" is courseware, outline, syllabus and has an "author"
•     The "event" is an execution of the course, complete with an "instructor", "students", "location", "startTime", "endTime", etc
•     One course may have many events/executions
•     Each event is an execution of one course

Many companies can and do apply this model to "online courses" as well (U of Phoenix, Coursera, etc).

That's a very 20th century definition of a course though. When broadband internet became readily available (2002-2004), online video courses became popular. These are still a "course" but there is no "event" associated:

•     The "course" is authored and the materials created
•     The course is recorded on video - this serves as the single and only definition of the course (thus it is most certainly "a distinct unit" much like a book or movie)
•     The course is then packaged (as a download, as a DVD)
•     Students purchase the course and receive the materials (via download or DVD)
•     Students "attend" the course at their leisure
•     The students can take as much or as little of the course as they want
•     They can do it all in one sitting or take the course in two years

This is the model many sites are using - Lynda.com, LearnItFirst.com, Kelby, etc. These are complete "courses" - often a direct replacement for a 2-day to 5-day in-person training class/course.

To help mark up these online courses, I'd definitely think that a "Course" should be available. A lot of this can be approached much in the manner you would design a database:

• A "course" has required attributes "title, description, subject matter, length, author"
• A course has an optional repeating element "chapter" that has its own "title, description, length" (or "unit" or "section" or...)
  
• A course has an optional repeating element "event" that has a "location, startTime, endTime"
• An event has an "offer" that has a "purchasePrice"
• An event has an optional repeating element "student" that has "firstName, lastName, etc"

With such a model, you would be able to have:

• Courses without events
• Courses with events
• Courses with events but no students
• Courses with events with students

It is elastic - it fits both models.

Thoughts?

[Steve Midgley]

20th or 21st century, I would argue that there is a course definition/catalog and a course experience set of events and they are distinct. There are also nuances in between - such as course schedule definitions. In the models that were discussed earlier the experience portion was more structured (20th century/traditional university). The model you're describing I think is around the experience portion such as "school of one," mooc, and anytime/anywhere courses - where one student can experience the learning at any given time under lots of conditions (I'd point out that this model is also 20th century and maybe even 19th century with mail-in correspondence courses, and by-mail VHS and audio cassette/CD style courses). There are hybrids too - like asynchronous moocs with forums and synchronous hangouts.

My second observation is that where we can construct definitions that use only available keywords and objects from schema.org as it exists, that's easier to create consensus around - otherwise we have to submit new definitions to schema which is a non-trivial process. I think you were introducing some new keywords, and I'm not sure if they are necessary (I think there is pricing data available through other means already?)

It seems very useful to offer a definition of different elements of a course - regardless of it's type. I wonder if this is possible within the realm of what exists in schema.org including LRMI? I'd guess it is, but might require some bending, like my suggestion of using alignment object in a somewhat unusual way (I don't know if that's a good suggestion or a bad one yet)..

Best,

Steve

[Scott Whigham]

Thanks for the fast reply, Steve. I'm a newbie to LRMI so I'll apologize to the group if my questions/comments are a bit naive haha.

The more I think about it, the more I think that a "course" (of any kind) is almost a direct copy of a "book" (in the Schema.org schema) than anything else. A course definition/catalog is really only distinct (in terms of the properties of the object) from the "course experience set of events" as you mention. A course and book have almost identical properties (http://schema.org/Book). There might be other small differences, yes, but I think saying,

So is it possible to "rally around" the idea of adding a "Course" and then suggest that institutions use "Event" for the "course experience set of events"? I would like to see: http://schema.org/Course and it should be almost identical to the Book schema but also have the LRMI educationRole, educationalAlignment, etc.

For reference: http://schema.org/Book

[Steve Midgley]

Welcome - I should have said that first. Schema is somewhat flat, but I guess we could subclass Course from Book? Or maybe just copy all the elements. I don't know how consensus would work to get mods to LRMI and its website in prelude to proposing a change to schema? Greg is not working on this anymore at CC so I don't know what the process is. Dan Mills at CC would be amenable I'm sure to changes to that site to start settling on an approach, assuming others are interested and supportive.

I don't think there is a clear path to generating consensus about this. Scott, you might just copy the html from book off schema, change to course, modify what you want (using only current schema elements) and post somewhere as essentially an RFC for the change?

I wish I knew how we generate consensus on this list w/out Greg - anyone with thoughts?

Also for the course experience stuff, there's an interest project you might be interested in also: http://www.adlnet.gov/tla/experience-api

Best,

Steve

[Brandt Redd]

Regarding adding LRMI properties to Book, they are already available. Since the LRMI properties are part of CreativeWork and Book inherits from CreativeWork it also gets the LRMI treatment.

 

-Brandt

 

From: lr...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lr...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Steve Midgley
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2013 4:31 PM
To: lr...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Any chance of a "course" type at schema.org?

 

Welcome - I should have said that first. Schema is somewhat flat, but I guess we could subclass Course from Book? Or maybe just copy all the elements. I don't know how consensus would work to get mods to LRMI and its website in prelude to proposing a change to schema? Greg is not working on this anymore at CC so I don't know what the process is. Dan Mills at CC would be amenable I'm sure to changes to that site to start settling on an approach, assuming others are interested and supportive.

[Steve Midgley]

Thanks Brandt. I think just declaring Courses to be "books" in metadata would be counter-intuitive. Do you agree? Would it make sense to define a child of Book called Course. But it's not really a kind of book? Or we could just declare a new CreativeWork child called Course and just copy all the Book elements that are relevant since it's the same thing effectively but people would expect it to have a different name? And I'd propose "LearningCourse" to "Course" since Course could refer to a course in a meal and other unrelated things. I'd prefer LearningCourse to InstructionalCourse for obvious reasons.. Thoughts?

Steve

[Jim Klo]

It would seem to me that "Course" would be specialization of CreativeWork over Book.

I might even consider that looking at the proposed ActivityActions as mechanism to define "Course":

http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/ActivityActions

http://www.w3.org/wiki/images/6/6a/Actions_in_Schema.org_-_Draft_3.pdf

Events and Activities that are defined as part of the lesson plan of a course seem like they could be distilled into a sequence of "actions that can be executed".  

The ActivityActions proposal is intended to identify a vocabulary for both ActivityStream like actions as well as "actions that can be executed". I believe there is also discussion that there is a property available on Thing or CreativeWork identifying different kinds of actions.

Cheers,

Jim

[Marie Bienkowski]

I know you don't need to use all the properties, but declaring a LearningCourse to be "books" seems counterintuitive.

The Accessibility Metadata project for example would like to say This book is in DAISY format but you would not say that about a Course.

http://www.a11ymetadata.org/the-specification/

I have not looked at this in enough detail to understand why LearningCourse adding LRMI type learningResourceType (The predominant type or kind characterizing the learning resource.) etc does not work however. You need some properties from Book that are not in CreativeWork+LRMI?

Marie

Marie Bienkowski

SRI; 650-859-5485

@mariebienkowski

On Jul 12, 2013, at 2:46 PM, Steve Midgley <steve....@mixrun.com>

 wrote:

[Brandt Redd]

Agreed. Even though it has most of the right properties, it still needs a different name because there’s a different use/purpose.

[Steve Midgley]

That's a nice idea Marie - don't invent an object when an attribute will do. Could we publish a recommended set of existing/recommended attributes on lrmi for a Learning Course - basically "when you set "learningResourceType" = "LearningCourse", we also recommend you include some/all of the following attributes to define it.

And from what I understand of LRMI/Schema there's nothing stopping anyone from adding that attribute now to their metadata, but way better if everyone is using the same set of attributes and precisely the same attribute value.

[Phil Barker]

Hello all, sorry for the late contribution, I was away when this discussion kicked off.

I think one of the issues is, as Steve and Scott make clear, that the idea of a "course" covers many different things. I wonder if it is worth trying to identify and address some of these separately rather than cover them all with the same term. Some of these separate things might be:

A curriculum (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curriculum ), in the sense of the planned interaction of learners with one or more: learning resources, learning activities, other people. There has been a lot of work on describing learning designs over the last 10+ years that should be relevant.

An educational event (traditional face-to-face lesson/lecture/seminar). Maybe just need to add some LRMI properties to schema.org/Event [which I thought was going to happen].

A series of educational events. The concepts of collections and series are things that need dealing with at a schema.org level, not LRMI.

An opportunity to study offered by someone, possibly leading to some qualification (e.g. a university degree programme, a module in a degree programme, a MOOC, a correspondence course) . See for example http://www.cen-ltso.net/main.aspx?put=1042

I have tried not to use the term 'course', but I'm not especially wedded to the alternative terms I've used. There are obviously overlaps and relationships between these things, some of these may be subtle and debatable, so I haven't mentioned any. I have deliberately left out competence frameworks and other ways of describing the learning objectives, which are also clearly related. Finally, there may be hidden parts, for example Scott mentioned that "It's almost like there's a one-to-many definition between the "course" and an execution of the course"-- which is pretty much what the link for "opportunity to study" describes.


Regards, Phil.

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[Jim Goodell]

It looks like there is consensus that a Course as a designed set of learning experiences is different from delivery of a course, commonly called a "Course-Section" as an instance of a course that may be event-based...and both of Hesse concepts are different than a "course of study" which might better be called a Program of Study to avoid confusion.

E.g. CEDS is reviewing its current definitions...

Course -- The organization of subject matter and related learning experiences provided for the instruction of students on a regular or systematic basis, usually for a predetermined period of time (e.g., a semester or two-week workshop) to an individual or group of students.

Class-Section or Course-Section -- A (virtual or physical) setting in which organized instruction of course content is provided to one or more students (including cross-age groupings) for a given period of time. (A Course may be offered to more than one class/section.) Instruction, provided by one or more teachers or other staff members, may be delivered in person or via a different medium. Classes/Sections that share space should be considered as separate classes/sections if they function as separate units for more than 50 percent of the time.

...as Phil pointed out, the shift from course-sections as time-based delivery to asynchronous competency-based attainment requires a flexible definition.

Now for the LRMI approach to "Course" as a designed set of learning experiences (either the curriculum or the entire package in the case of courseware). The approach that Steve articulated seems to work, I.e. if learningResorceType=Course then suggested attributes include (set of existing LRMI and Schema.org terms). I can't thing of any examples of an instance/delivery of a course, i.e. a Course-Section, being a Learning Resource.

Jim

[Steve Midgley]

To be fair, it was Marie Bienkowski who suggested the key/value approach.

I like Jim's general suggestion which is to re-use vocabulary from CEDS where possible, which helps avoid re-litigating definitions which is not very productive. Unless CEDS doesn't have a definition for something we want to describe (sounds like it might be missing the concept of a course-section as a learning resource.)

I think sequence of course-sections as a learning resource is very likely to come up online. "AP Calc online MOOC starts Wed, runs 32 weeks. Teacher online for support Tue/Thu synchronously."

Is that the kind of thing we need several definitions for?

Course = curriculum for AP Calc used in the MOOC

Course-section = Teacher online support events

The entire MOOC run from Wed - 32 weeks out = ???

Barking up wrong tree?

Steve

[Jim Goodell]

Steve,

CEDS has the Course-Section concept as an instance of a Course for one or more learners and usually bounded by a time period (even if self paced).  The CEDS logical model has relationships from Course-Section (Class-Section) to Learner Activity to Learning Resource...but it probably requires a deeper discussion to determine if the elements and relationships are there to support your suggested use case. 

I still don't see that the course-section is a type of resource, rather the "activity" or online event assigned within a course-section is the resource...and if it is designed for use outside of that single instance then it is an activity for a course (not section specific)...but maybe I'm misunderstanding the case you described.

jim

[Alan Paull]

XCRI-CAP has 'course' for the overall programme for marketing purposes; and then multiple 'presentations' which are actual learning opportunities (particular offerings), which could have different study modes, attendance patterns, attendance modes, start dates and durations. This is all in the context of marketing, in other words before enrolment.

 

This may be an important point - there is a difference between learning opportunities marketed, and learning opportunities run. You can have students studying the latter, but only applicants for the former. However, as much of what is on the internet is course marketing information, maybe it's an issue that needs to be addressed in schema.org, if "course" is to be cracked.

 

Alan Paull

 

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From: lr...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lr...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jim Goodell
Sent: 26 July 2013 20:06
To: lr...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Any chance of a "course" type at schema.org?

 

Steve,

[Steve Midgley]

Well said - that's basically what I was trying to get it, but I hadn't thought of tying it to internet marketing writ large. But that's effectively the right way to look at it from a modeling perspective, I think.

Jim does that help show in what way a course-section is like a learning resource? They both could be searched and listed in marketing materials and they could both be given away or bought/sold.. Maybe some other common attributes I'm not thinking of.. 

Traditionally it would be a course that it advertised in a catalog, and the section is what you take. But it seems like you could advertise the actual course-section as well, which is what Alan is getting at if I'm following along (no guarantees on that).

Steve

[Jim Goodell]

Thank you Alan and Steve.  I can see the marketing use case. However, the most of the meta data is at the course level, the metadata for course-section (before enrollment) is limited to things like the begin and end dates for the section, maximum number of participants, deadline for enrollment, instructor assigned, costs for this offering...everything else about the course content is at the course, not section, level.  It also becomes less relevant for discoverability if the course-section enrollment period has ended, whereas the course level information continues to have value.

[Alan Paull]

Yes, the bulk of the information is at course level (if you count the characters). However, at presentation level (course-section before enrolment) you have some very important stuff for learners to find out:

* When is it happening?

* Where is it happening?

* How much does it cost

* What are requirements for attendance (if any)?

* How do I apply?

If the enrolment period has ended, then yes the above information is not very relevant, but then again the course level stuff has little value too, unless there's another presentation some time :-).

Alan

[Besant Technologies Training Institute]

Hi,

which schema is suitable for this type of courses??

http://www.besanttechnologies.com/training-courses/php-training/php-training-institute-in-chennai
http://www.besanttechnologies.com/training-courses/oracle-training/sql-training-institute-in-chennai



On Saturday, April 27, 2013 5:43:03 PM UTC+5:30, Ruben wrote:

Hello, 

I have started reading on RDF and the semantic web just yesterday and I have been reading about scherma.org and LRMI today, because I am creating a website that will list publicly available online courses, paid online courses and paid offline courses in a 'brick and mortar' location. 

I bumped into this interesting list message a couple of hours ago and since then I have been reading your website and I have tried to find out if I can expect meta data types at schema.org for the data I am displaying on my website in the near future.

This is the list message I am referring to: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012May/0007.html

What I would need is exactly what "Aaron" is describing in his message. I would need a "course" type and perhaps an "online course" type.

I hope I am barking up the right tree here. I would really appreciate if you could tell me if your efforts are geared towards these new types at schema.org.

[Phil Barker]

On 28/04/14 08:55, Besant Technologies Training Institute wrote:

Hi,

which schema is suitable for this type of courses??

Hello,
if you want to use LRMI properties that you would have to treat the courses as being creative works (that is because the properties added to schema.org by LRMI was added to the schema.org/CreativeWork class).  Looking at the information that you display, I am not sure how many LRMI properties would be relevant. Of those listed at http://www.lrmi.net/the-specification I can see that you display timeRequired (as course duration). You could probably work in a learningResourceType (as training course) somewhere quite easily. It would be great if you could relate your syllabus to some established framework used in the IT industry (competency framework or similar), but that is too domain specific for me to comment on.

Most of the rest of what you display is covered by generic schema.org properties for a creative work (name, about, description, contributor for trainer...) Some of what you display relates to the classes as events, so you might want to consider using the schema.org/EducationEvent for the properties of location and start date (if you ever advertise this). It's regrettable that the properties LRMI added to schema.org didn't get attached to EducationEvent, but the additionalType property seems in principle to give you the opportunity to bring these properties into the description.

Hope this helps, Phil.

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[ga...@organicweb.com.au]

Certain a very interesting discussion.

Defining using 'events' won't work for my needs which are:

1. Course may be provided at any time according to the need of participants (as the course is aimed at delivering personalised training for organizations).
2. Course content may be amended/adaptable.
3. Location isn't set (the location may be at the clients premises or public premises etc.).

I'd love to see a type where custom courses (without set dates) may be defined using schema.org

[Jim Goodell]

To clarify, the discussion thread so far has come to consensus (I think) that there are three concepts for Course:

1. Course - the design/content of a Course as schema.org/CreativeWork -- This may be aligned to competencies as learning objectives, and a set of other learning resources designed to be used within the course.
2. Course Section - a planned instance or presentation of the Course
3. The optional scheduling of a Course Section as one or more Events -- this might be handled as an educationalAlignment between Course Section and Event or if a Course Section can include optional Event info.

I think a formal proposal on the WC3 group was supposed to have been revised based on the earlier conversation, but I can't locate the new version. Maybe someone else here can provide that link.

jim

[Phil Barker]

Hello all,
I'm not so sure about part 3 below, I don't think that it is a good use of educationalAlignment. I think calling an event  "a node in an educational framework," which is what alignments point to, is stretching the concept of educational event. I would rather see hasPart or subEvent being used for this. That's not directly possible if we think of a course section as a creative work because hasPart is a CreativeWork -> CreativeWork relationship (and so cannot point to events) and subEvent is a Event -> Event relationship (and so cannot point from a CreativeWork). This can be fixed by making course section a child of both Event and CreativeWork (i.e. having characteristics of both).

Phil

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[Stuart Sutton]

+1

Stuart

[Aaron Bradley]

Since this thread has found new like, please note that since this thread started the subject has also been re-awakened at public-vocabs, and there's an extensive thread addressing it.

I the last message, in Dec. 2014, Vicki Tardif Holland said "I'll send out an updated proposal after the new year" but his hasn't yet materialized AFAIK.

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2014Dec/0104.html

The extant proposal can be found at:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YWjLzZC8FiTiOwSAETRIEozeqZdn6O8a4fgqK4t5Ss/edit