Proposal: Use CEDS “Learning Resource Education Level" controlled vocabulary URIs for grade levels in LRMI/LR

[Jim Goodell]

With the release of CEDS v4 set for next week I’d like to make a proposal for use of the CEDS data element “Learning Resource Education Level” option set as the controlled vocabulary for LRMI and Learning Registry tagging U.S. grade levels.  CEDS has matured to a P20W standard, so the element includes early learning and postsecondary levels as well as K12 grade levels.

 

The CEDS website ceds.ed.gov has a human readable web page for each data element.  My proposal is to use the fragment identifier (#) with the unique code representing the grade-level in the option set.  This will provide a unique machine readable term (URI) for each grade level …and by using the (#) it could also link to the applicable table row on the human-readable page.

 

E.g.

CEDS uniquely defines “Ninth grade” in the option set for Learning Resource Education Level. The URI is: https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#09 .

 

Learning Resource Education Level (CEDS v4)

Definition

The education level, grade level or primary instructional level at which a Learning Resource is intended.

Option Set (with proposed URIs)

Description	Code	URI
Infant/toddler	IT	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#IT
Preschool	PR	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#PR
Prekindergarten	PK	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#PK
Transitional Kindergarten	TK	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#TK
Kindergarten	KG	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#KG
First grade	01	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#01
Second grade	02	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#02
Third grade	03	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#03
Fourth grade	04	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#04
Fifth grade	05	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#05
Sixth grade	06	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#06
Seventh grade	07	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#07
Eighth grade	08	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#08
Ninth grade	09	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#09
Tenth grade	10	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#10
Eleventh grade	11	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#11
Twelfth grade	12	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#12
Grade 13	13	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#13
Associates degree	AS	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#AS
Bachelor's degree	BA	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#BA
Post-baccalaureate certificate	PB	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#PB
Master's degree	MD	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#MD
Post-master's certificate	PM	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#PM
Doctoral degree	DO	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#DO
Post-doctoral certificate	PD	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#PD
Adult Education	AE	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#AE
Professional or technical credential	PR	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#PR
Other	OT	https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#OT

 

 

 

[Phil Barker]

Hello Jim, I like the way that the Learning Registry list has been discussing its way towards shared vocabularies.

This proposal would be for use within an AlignmentObject, right? It might be useful if you also fixed on a standard term to use for educationalFramework, presumably something like "Common Education Data Standards v4" is sufficient.

So an example would be something along the lines of

Item
type: http://schema.org/CreativeWork
property
    url : http://example.org/learningResource
    name: Example
    educationalAlignment: Item 1
    ...

Item 1
type: http://schema.org/AlignmentObject
property
    alignmentType: educationLevel
    educationalFramework: Common Education Data Standards v4
    targetUrl: https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=6212#06
    targetName: 06
    targetDescription: Sixth grade
  
[The targetName and targetDescription are there for the benefit of people who can't process the URL, you could argue that "sixth grade" should be the name, but that's not relevant here]

Is there any hope that CEDS might provide machine readable information on some URI?

Phil

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Learning Resource Metadata Initiative" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lrmi+uns...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

-- 
<http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/>

---

Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year 2011-2013
Top in the UK for student experience
Fourth university in the UK and top in Scotland (National Student Survey 2012)

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.

[Jim Goodell]

Thank you for the example Phil. It is just what we had in mind.

If there is demand for the CEDS site to return some other machine readable format we can look into that. ...for consideration might be whether or not other parts of the standards, beyond just “Learning Resource Education Level" need to be referenced, and how it is used by what consuming platforms, LR, search engines, etc.

[Joshua Marks]

Hear hear, and it’s about time!

 

This is a great start at building common vocabularies for the LRMI properties. For US PK-Profession PD, this a very useful grade level framework. I agree with its use for educationalALignment as Phil illustrates.   I also agree a URI would be useful.

 

Now onto the same thing for the CommonCore skills (with state variances), reading levels, subjects, topics, resource types, etc. How do we propose and gain adoption for useful shared vocabularies like this? I have suggested for some time that using LR Nodes as filters that enforce specific metadata content policies (Such as acceptable vocabularies and required elements) is the best way to drive use and adoption. It also expresses the underlying conception of the Learning Registry’s “Network Communities” content distribution model. If the largest consumers agree on these content policies, from network communities, define the required vocabularies and enforce those practices via node filters, all who want to send content to them will comply.

 

Without this, we are all left with the challenge described by Jerome Grimmer at Sothern Illinois, and their effort to build ETL tools and logic, and publish and consume multiple divergent vocabularies and taxonomies. An inexact science at best.

 

Joshua Marks

Chief Technical Advisor (CTA)

Curriki: The Global Education and Learning Community

jma...@curriki.org

jma...@pcgus.com

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.

--

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google

Groups "Learning Registry: Collaborate" group.
 
To post: learning-regis...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe:learning-registry-co...@googlegroups.com
 
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/learning-registry-collaborate?hl=en?hl=en
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Learning Registry: Collaborate" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to learning-registry-co...@googlegroups.com.

[Regan, Damon]

Greetings All,

I am very interested in this thread and especially the concept Joshua proposes.  How might we begin prototyping such ideas to make use of and encourage machine readable URIs for these important reference points?

Best Regards,

Damon

--

Damon Regan
Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative
407-208-5056 office

[Brandt Redd]

To echo Joshua and others, it’s really great to finally have this vocabulary! Thanks to Jim and his crew for putting it together.

 

-Brandt

_____________________________________

Brandt Redd

Chief Technology Officer

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium

voice: (202) 656-8112

web: smarterbalanced.org

email: brand...@smarterbalanced.org

[Paul Libbrecht]

My proposal here would be to use ontologies…

We have attempted that in "GeoSkills": http://i2geo.net/About/GeoSkills

For the things originally discussed in this thread, GeoSkills has 

- educational level

- educational pathway (a series of level, e.g. primary school)

- educational region

We've encoded quite some levels in Europe, where it is heavily scattered.

I tend to find the URIs in GeoSkills slightly more readable than URLs containing such as TermId=6212#06.

paul

Le 26 janv. 2014 à 23:16, Joshua Marks <jma...@curriki.org> a écrit :

Hear hear, and it’s about time!

 

This is a great start at building common vocabularies for the LRMI properties. For US PK-Profession PD, this a very useful grade level framework. I agree with its use for educationalALignment as Phil illustrates.   I also agree a URI would be useful.

 

Now onto the same thing for the CommonCore skills (with state variances), reading levels, subjects, topics, resource types, etc. How do we propose and gain adoption for useful shared vocabularies like this? I have suggested for some time that using LR Nodes as filters that enforce specific metadata content policies (Such as acceptable vocabularies and required elements) is the best way to drive use and adoption. It also expresses the underlying conception of the Learning Registry’s “Network Communities” content distribution model. If the largest consumers agree on these content policies, from network communities, define the required vocabularies and enforce those practices via node filters, all who want to send content to them will comply.

 

Without this, we are all left with the challenge described by Jerome Grimmer at Sothern Illinois, and their effort to build ETL tools and logic, and publish and consume multiple divergent vocabularies and taxonomies. An inexact science at best.

 

Joshua Marks

Chief Technical Advisor (CTA)

Curriki: The Global Education and Learning Community

jma...@curriki.org

jma...@pcgus.com

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.

 

To unsubscribe:learning-registry-collabo...@googlegroups.com

 
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/learning-registry-collaborate?hl=en?hl=en
 
--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Learning Registry: Collaborate" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to learning-registry-co...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Steve Midgley]

I also like more descriptive URLs, but I'll take what we can get!

It seems like we need a way to post recommend vocabularies to solve specific problems? Would submitting our requests to LRMI and getting them to annotate that website with vocabularies as they are developed make sense? In this case we'd post the original URL from Jim and the schema example from Phil to document that preferred use?

Is that the best place for it? We can easily add pages (and grant anyone access who wants it) to post this information on the learningregistry.org CMS site if that's preferable? It seems like a human readable documentation of controlled vocabs would be a good start?

Thoughts?

Steve

[Phil Barker]

Hello Paul, are you suggesting the GeoSkills URLs be used for US PK12+ levels instead of the CEDS URLs, that they be used to reference European educational levels not covered by CEDS, or that some service adopt an ontologies approach similar to GeoSkills?

Phil

-- 
work: http://people.pjjk.net/phil
twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/philbarker

Ubuntu: not so much an operating system as a learning opportunity.
http://xkcd.com/456/

[Phil Barker]

Hello all. Apologies for the delay in replying to this, but if I have learnt one thing about vocabulary management for metadata it is not to rush into volunteering to do it. Which is to say, after suitable thought, yes: let's do something to improve the knowledge base about what vocabularies could be recommended for specific scenarios, based on existing usage. My preference would be to use the LRMI site, I think that is the natural place where people would expect to find such information (you see, I'm hoping it will be used more widely than the Learning Registry, though use there is very significant). I'll try that first, and if it proves difficult I'll look into using the learning reg CMS (thanks for that offer, Steve).

One caveat: I am cautious about where to pitch the balance along the continuum of universal mandatory vocabularies through to complete free-for-all. I note Steve's phrase "recommend vocabularies to solve specific problems" which seems like a sensible point to aim for. I think the starting point, what we can do now, is recording existing practice (after some consideration of whether it is good practice). I hope it's not too big a step to get from there to recommended practice.

Send examples via this list, and I'll record who is using what; discuss the examples here and we can work out what is good practice.

Phil

On 28/01/14 23:09, Steve Midgley wrote:

I also like more descriptive URLs, but I'll take what we can get!

It seems like we need a way to post recommend vocabularies to solve specific problems? Would submitting our requests to LRMI and getting them to annotate that website with vocabularies as they are developed make sense? In this case we'd post the original URL from Jim and the schema example from Phil to document that preferred use?

Is that the best place for it? We can easily add pages (and grant anyone access who wants it) to post this information on the learningregistry.org CMS site if that's preferable? It seems like a human readable documentation of controlled vocabs would be a good start?

Thoughts?

Steve

[Stuart Sutton]

Phil, I'd think your aversion to rushing into vocabulary management is rooted in your knowledge that simply creating a list of vocabulary concepts is usually the easy part.  The long-haul and general usility of vocabularies requires more.  So, perhaps asking for some specific information about suggested vocabularies would be good.  For example, fairly targeted questions like:

• Who "owns" the vocabulary?
  
• Are there use restrictions for the vocabulary; and, if so, are they prescribed through conventional licensing (e.g., CC-BY etc.)?
  
• How is the vocabulary maintained, further developed, and by whom?
  
• What social assurances have been made that the vocabulary won't disappear tomorrow (or fall into disrepair)?

Many organizations have their own "home-grown" vocabularies for use in their own systems that are just fine for those "local" uses; but, not all organizations have any kind of "satisfactory" answers to such questions because they implicate uses that fall outside the organization's remit and responses implicate commitment of resources (technical, , human expertise, financial etc.).  Why not ask for responses to a small set of questions.  It is simple for someone suggesting a vocabulary to say things like "no longer actively maintained" or "no articulated maintenance/curation policy available" and "CC-By licensed". 

I am personally cautious in advising anyone to use vocabularies for open, public uses that don't have acceptable (or any) answers to these kind of questions--even if the vocabulary is excellent otherwise.  I don't think you have to be the U.S. Library of Congress to have articulated policies that respond to these kinds of questions. 

As far as I am concerned, Phil, having useful responses to questions like this helps me place vocabularies on your continuum--"universal mandatory vocabularies through to complete free-for-all".  CEDS can certainly respond easily to these kinds of questions.  Other vocabulary creators/maintainers can respond as well.  Some cannot respond usefully to any of these kinds of questions.

While not of the same ilk as the questions above, having a clear statement of available serializations of the vocabulary (e.g., SKOS, ) and made available (published as simple text, API to vocabulary management system etc. ) would be useful.

There are widely recognized schemas out there for describing assets such as vocabularies...golly, golly more metadata that can be globally shared!  Maybe a simple form-based "suggester" that uses one of these schemas?

​

Stuart

[Vijendra]

Hi Phil,
As you asked for example, I have put out some of the work (links at the bottom of post) I have done which might help us all know if this is the kind of thing we are looking for.
I have been working on vocabulary in education domain as a part of my master's thesis.
Hopefully, this will form the basis for growth in the direction of building educational vocabulary.

The vocabulary is in form of concept maps and is a taxonomy.
The concepts were obtained by scraping public works such as wikipedia and online dictionaries such as wordnet.
I have also looked for the concepts from harvested metadata from OAI-PMH.
I have relied on wordnet dictionary to provide the appropriate relationships between concepts, so the correctness lies with wordnet.

Of course, it goes without saying that it is utterly incomplete and that completing it to a usable form would take some time. But that's one step towards the goal.
I am pretty sure that errors would have crept in and therefore would really appreciate if people would add, remove or modify the concept maps wherever they feel I have been not been correct. (Under IHMC Public Cmaps - educationVocabulary [would need cmap tool])

I would love to roll-out more work if it can be established that we are moving in right direction.
Here are some of the concept maps for quick browser view.

Under educationalRole (which is a LRMI property):

student: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-1NCDB2K-5RGW/student.cmap

educator: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-19XM7P0-5RGV/educator.cmap

coach (trainer): http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-1H1DDPF-5RH0/coach%20(trainer).cmap

mentor: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-12HPHWK-5RH5/mentor.cmap
academic administrator: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-HPX3RJ-5RH1/academic%20administrator.cmap

Under learningResourceType:

book: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-ZCQ3PG-5RGR/book.cmap

document: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-3C9TPP-5RGS/document.cmap

map: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-VHDX35-5RH4/map.cmap

thesis: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-1YSJM4N-5RH2/thesis.cmap
fiction: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-29R6F61-5RGX/fiction.cmap
literary_composition: http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1MLN8935Y-NDWVH5-5RGQ/literary_composition.cmap

Vijendra
Final year post graduate student
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

[Jim Goodell]

Thank you Vijendra.  As I understand it, the original idea for LRMI was not to define the vocabulary and just let search engines discover what people/organizations use as possible values.  However, in the U.S. there is a critical-mass of state education agencies that got together and decided what they wanted to use as possible values for things like learningResourceType when tagging objects in their state repositories.  So it is being market-driven in a way we didn't expect.

...Just catching up with this thread.  

I like Steve's idea about posting recommended vocabularies "to solve specific problems" to the LRMI site ...the recommended options may be different depending on context/geography.

I like Phil's comment about needed a balance between universal mandatory vocabularies through to complete free-for-all.  Noting as "existing practices" is a good idea, and when there are alternative sets maybe who is using each set for what.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "Learning Resource Metadata Initiative" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/lrmi/WSLyufKGMtI/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to lrmi+uns...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--

-Jim Goodell

508.728.6074

[Vijendra]

Thanks Jim. I didn't know that US state education agencies had already put together possible values for things.
I agree that the idea for LRMI is not to define vocabulary and let search engine do its wonders.

However, what I wish to achieve with the concept maps is a way to differentiate between the various concepts - how every resource has a different utility and how stakeholders of education domain would name them differently. So, for example, if a student from one part of world searches for a book which is a 'synonym finder', then any educational resource (a 'book') tagged as 'thesaurus' should come up in the search results. (Of course, a synonym_finder should definitely come up).

Also, before doing this exercise, I never knew that there could be so many different formats and types of books. The book cmap I made is a witness of how so many learning resources can all be tagged 'book'. So on searching for educational resources utilizing a particular type of book for instruction in an educational setting (in a lecture or course or program), say picture_book, I wouldn't want results for other type of books, only resources tagged as picture_books (and maybe with added attribute of advanced_copy) - thus making my search more specific, and thereby efficient.

I believe that the more open the vocabulary is, the better results it will get by people adding their own insights and accepting what they wish to align to.
It would be great if there was a way to map context other than from geographic domain.
Also, Phil's comment about finding balance is the statement that should become the guiding force for building vocabularies.

[Phil Barker]

Hello Stuart, and thank you, yes, that is line of reasoning behind my reluctance to commit to full-on vocabulary development and management. Strike me that the questions you pose would be a very good framework for any discussion around which vocabularies demonstrated good practice. I'll put some thought into that form-based suggester.

Phil

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Learning Resource Metadata Initiative" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lrmi+uns...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

-- 
<http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/>

[Steve Midgley]

Thanks for the reminder Jim - I do believe that several states are working on some controlled vocabs for schema.org so we really should get their work represented in Phil's "call for input." And to be clear, representing draft and recommended vocabs on LRMI seems like a good way to steer many orgs to "do the right thing" voluntarily -- often technically (in my experience) I am presented with little choice other than to "make it up" because I can't find the common practice. If we can give people some clear guidelines on LRMI, that should steer many people who don't care how they do it, to do it the same way other people are doing it..

Where groups like the states who are building a common vocab can agree on something more official, that could ultimately get represented inside CEDS as an official vocab, and we could just put reference/docs to it on the LRMI side.

So in some ways the pipeline from chaos to order is:

1. Community use and common practice observed
   
2. Document/clarify/organize these voluntary common practices on LRMI.net
1. Lots of examples!
3. Coordinate various groups (states, vendors, etc) to officially adopt these practices
4. Publish/adopt formal standards with CEDS or other standards body

And right now we're all just talking about solving step 1 to 2?

Sound about right? I'll loop in some state folks to this conversation to try to solicit their latest work.

Steve

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Learning Resource Metadata Initiative" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lrmi+uns...@googlegroups.com.

[Stuart Sutton]

An addition question that occurs to me is whether a suggested vocabulary is of general utility or (quite legitimately) jurisdictional.  This could aid in slicing and dicing suggested vocabularies.  A classic jurisdictional vocabulary would be education level. 

Stuart

--

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google

Groups "Learning Registry: Collaborate" group.
 
To post: learning-regis...@googlegroups.com

To unsubscribe:learning-registry-co...@googlegroups.com

 
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/learning-registry-collaborate?hl=en?hl=en
 
---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Learning Registry: Collaborate" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to learning-registry-co...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--

Stuart A. Sutton, 

Managing Director, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)

   http://dublincore.org

Associate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington 

   Information School

   http://ischool.uw.edu/

Email: stuart...@gmail.com

Skype: sasutton

DCMI - a project of ASIS&T

   https://www.asis.org/

[Lorna M Campbell]

On 13 Feb 2014, at 13:06, Stuart Sutton wrote:

An addition question that occurs to me is whether a suggested vocabulary is of general utility or (quite legitimately) jurisdictional.  This could aid in slicing and dicing suggested vocabularies.  A classic jurisdictional vocabulary would be education level. 

Agreed.  More than a few of the vocabulary issues that have arisen in the past result from assumptions that vocabularies can be applied generally without reference to their original jurisdictions.   Educational level is the classic case but educational role is another example.  Vijendra's "student" concept map is a good example of a vocabulary that includes both general and jurisdictional terms. 

Cheers

Lorna

-- Lorna M Campbell --

Assistant Director, Cetis

Web: www.cetis.ac.uk

Blog: lornamcampbell.wordpress.com

Mail: lorna.m....@icloud.com
Twitter: LornaMCampbell
Skype: lorna120768