schema.org proposal: VLEs and online courses

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Abdulaziz Aldaej

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Nov 3, 2014, 9:09:55 AM11/3/14
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Hi

I would like to share with you our proposal to schema.org to describe Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) that is available in schema.org proposals list and discussion. We have been working in this proposal for a long time after a broad review and discussion. Furthermore, we just presented this proposal in ISWC2014 and LILE2014, as a main part of our paper "An Enhanced Approach to Semantic Markup of VLEs Content Based on schema.org<http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1254/6_aldaej.pdf>". Full details of our proposal can be accessed via the following links:

The proposal details: https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/VLEs

In addition, this proposal can be also appropriate for other open online courses (e.g., MOOCs) as Course is a main type of VLEs structure. However, there is a a bit similar proposal to describe online courses which has been proposed recently by Guangyuan  Piao. Full details about this recent proposal can be accessed via the link below. This is a really encouraging and shows also the high demand to add a support of online courses in schema.org.

https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Course
All feedbacks are highly appreciated!

Abdulaziz Aldaej
____________________________
PhD student
Department of Computing
University of Surrey
Guildford GU2 7XH, UK
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Steve Midgley

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Nov 3, 2014, 1:01:12 PM11/3/14
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I think this topic has come up before on this list, in terms of how to describe courses of various kinds. From listings in college course catalogs to entries on transcript reports to online listings for course offerings (which is I think your proposal here for VLE's?). I believe the group stayed away from this description in the past, but maybe the time is right now! I'd love to see a unified, web standard description of courses.

I'd guess that in addition to LRMI narrowly defined, other standards groups that describe courses today might have interest: Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), PESC, IMS Global, and SIFA are 4 that come to mind readily. Obviously Dublin Core, now the maintainer of LRMI is relevant, but you get that group's attention for free by posting to LRMI I think.

Personally, this isn't an area of expertise for me, so I don't think I can give you input on VLE vs Course proposals, but I do think the groups I mentioned, plus the experts on this list do have very practical and extensive experience on this subject..

I will say that making sure you can align courses/VLE's with the AlignmentObject among other lrmi tags would be nice to have.

Best,
Steve


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Barker, Phil

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Nov 4, 2014, 10:23:10 AM11/4/14
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Hello Abdulaziz, as Steve says LRMI is moving to a new home, we're just setting up the furniture and will have the "welcome" mat in place pretty soon, but you do have our attention :)

We have discussed applying LRMI to courses (online and otherwise) a couple of times before[1], and Guangyuan Piao has very recently also sent a suggestion [2]. It looks to me like a clear opportunity for further work once we are set up and running.

A couple of quick questions/suggestions about your proposal: why does the new "Course" class need a subject property? Could you not use the about property inherited from CreativeWork or the  educationalAlignment via an AlignmentObject with alignmentType of educationalSubject?  Also, what is the relationship between a Course and a Session?



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Stuart

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Nov 4, 2014, 7:17:02 PM11/4/14
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Hi Abdulaziz, both Steve and Phil characterize the transition of LRMI to a new permanent home correctly. We've just about got it all in order. 

The topic of properties and classes for description of courses has come up several times as Phil notes. We've seen several fairly mature proposal in the last several week (including yours). So far, the previous discussion threads haven't gotten a lot of discussion traction. Given the growing availability of courses and course-like events on the web, we'd expect the need for effective means to describe them to be high. Am I misreading the level of community interest in looking at course description within the context of LRMI?

Stuart

Steve Midgley

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Nov 4, 2014, 8:01:40 PM11/4/14
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I would be concerned if SIF/PESC/CEDS weren't getting their voice and past work included in any depiction of courses that LRMI were to provide. I think all three of those groups have done very extensive work in describing courses. I suspect that others on the list will know of other groups that have made similar progress in open metadata descriptions of courses?

Is it worth first just naming all the prior work that we collectively know about, so we can reach out to those groups to review the proposals that Abdulaziz provided? 

Can others name viable/open/public metadata descriptions of course metadata or similar, ideally with links, that they know about?

Steve



Barker, Phil

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Nov 5, 2014, 8:20:31 AM11/5/14
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Hello all,
I can throw in a couple more names from Europe:

CEN MLO-AD (metadata for learning opportunities - advertising) is a European Standard for metadata descriptions sufficient to advertise courses. http://www.cen-ltso.net/main.aspx?put=1042

XCRI - CAP (eXchanging Course-related information - course advertising profile) is a UK specification that is compliant with MLO-AD for doing the same http://www.xcri.co.uk/ 

[Disclaimer, the organisation I work with, Cetis, was involved in developing both, though we do not have a financial interest in their use.]

I'm sure there are others, and there is a wider question that we should address before going too far with this work: what is it that LRMI can offer that isn't already being done sufficiently well with existing specs? Answering that means defining the scope and purpose.

Scope: the proposals we have seen have been for online courses. There is clear interest there, but I think it has been commented (by Aaron Bradley on the public-vocabs list IIRC, and I think others) that it would be desirable to be able to describe conventional as well as online courses. I agree with this. But also do we have in mind University/College courses, or are we thinking short (say, half-day) professional development courses, general interest night classes, and including commercial correspondence courses as well? What about (k-12) schools? do they do courses? [FWIW, I'm inclined to think yes to all of these, especially if we are thinking in terms of something that schema.org might take up, but that brings me to...]

Purpose: there are many reasons to describe a course. From my point of view advertising / discovery is the stand-out use case (the history of development of XCRI to MLO-AD to XCRI-CAP pretty much exemplified this). However, I understand that other people are interested in facilitating reporting and analysis related to courses or managing learning within courses and other enterprise-related applications. From the resource discovery point of view, schema.org as a target makes sense. Clearly this is the area in which MLO-AD and XCRI work, but my understanding is that currently they are used in the context of specialist aggregators rather than the web-wide approach of schema, which is why I think they have something to offer that LRMI work could complement.

All the best, Phil



Sent: 05 November 2014 01:01

Valerie Smothers

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Nov 5, 2014, 8:33:56 AM11/5/14
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Hi, all.

 

My organization, MedBiquitous, has created a profile of lom for healthcare. V1 is an ANSI standard, V2 is in development. It’s used to describe learning activities, including accredited continuing education activities. Our current point release does include a way to tag an activity as using a VLE.

 

Best,

Valerie

 

 

Valerie Smothers

Deputy Director

MedBiquitous

vsmo...@jhmi.edu

www.medbiq.org

 

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Abdulaziz Aldaej

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Nov 5, 2014, 4:32:28 PM11/5/14
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Hello all,

Thanks all for your valuable responses and discussions!

Phil Barker: we propose "subject" instead of using the existing property "about", as "subject" offers more academic description and context than "about" does when describing the subject/field of the course (e.g., Computer Programming). Regarding the link between Course and Session, we propose "courseTitle" as a new property to the proposed type "Session" in order link the session to its relevant course. I hope that makes more sense now!

Best regards,
Abdulaziz

Barker, Phil

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Nov 6, 2014, 5:25:53 AM11/6/14
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Hello Valerie, I remember medbiquitous from my days working on LOM / IMS metadata. Good to hear that it is still going strong. Sounds like a learning activity that uses a VLE would indeed be a course. Have you found the need to extend or profile the LOM so that you can convey information such as start date, end date, qualification offered and so on? No need to explain in depth, just let me know what I should be looking for and where. I see things like activityLocation in the Health Care LOM, but I don't want to miss anything.

Thank you for getting in touch.

Phil


From: lr...@googlegroups.com [lr...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Valerie Smothers [vsmo...@jhmi.edu]
Sent: 05 November 2014 13:33

Barker, Phil

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Nov 6, 2014, 5:35:48 AM11/6/14
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Hello again.
ah, yes, I see I was looking for a link in the wrong direction, perhaps I am misunderstanding the intent of the Session type. Is Session intended to be the actual instantiation of a course? that is, the online interactions that take the place of what would be lectures, tutorial, seminars in a face to face course? I was thinking that when describing a course you would want  a link /from/ the course /to/ these interactions.

I am still not convinced that a new property "subject" is needed as well as about and educationalAlignment to an educationalSubject.

Phil




From: lr...@googlegroups.com [lr...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Abdulaziz Aldaej [aas...@gmail.com]
Sent: 05 November 2014 21:32

To: lr...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: schema.org proposal: VLEs and online courses
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Valerie Smothers

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Nov 6, 2014, 7:27:03 AM11/6/14
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Hi, Phil.

 

We don’t use the notion of course in any of our standards. We did add startDateTime and endDateTime elements to healthcare lom to convey data about face-to-face CE activities. We don’t have metadata related to qualifications. Instead we have a lot of metadata related to the Continuing Education credit system and the target audience for the activity.

 

We do have a separate standard that is all about conveying Curriculum data, but this is for an entire health professions program curriculum, not a single course.

 

Best,

Valerie

Stuart

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Nov 6, 2014, 8:27:31 AM11/6/14
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All, I have started a resources page for this courses/VLE discussion thread at [1] so we can track available references and related work as they purculate up through the conversation. The courses/VLE page is linked off the LRMI Task Group page at [2] on the DCMI wiki.

Please let me know if I have missed documenting any references that need noting in the conversation so far.

Stuart

[1] http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/AB-Comm/ed/LRMI/TG/courses
[2] http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/AB-Comm/ed/LRMI/TG

Abdulaziz Aldaej

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Nov 9, 2014, 7:05:21 PM11/9/14
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 Hello,

Phil Barker: You are almost right! We propose "Session" as an expressive and broad type in order to describe (Lecture, Lesson, tutorial, Lab class, Seminar, presentation, etc..).  We could extend the Session type with these subtypes but we would like to keep this proposal as simple as we can. So, it is not necessary for a session to have a link to a course as some session specific types such as seminars and presentations do not have any link to their relevant courses. However, we propose "courseTitle" as a new property to the proposed type "Session" in order link the session to its relevant course. 

Stuart: Excellent job. Thanks!

Best wishes,
Abdulaziz

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