schema.org for educational courses

[Phil Barker]

Hello all, this is essentially an invite to get involved with building a schema extension for educational courses, by way of a description of some of the work so far.

I'm sending this primarily to the schema.org mail list, but cc-ing to LRMI and DC-Education where I hope there will also be some interest. (In case you don't know, LRMI = Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, part of DCMI. I'm a member of the task group, you are welcome to get involved if it sounds interesting[1].)

About a year ago there was a flurry of discussion about wanting to markup descriptions of courses in schema [2]. Vicky Tardiff-Holland produced a proposal [3] which we discussed in LRMI and elsewhere as a result of which various suggestions were and comments were added to that proposal.

I also led some work in LRMI around scope, use cases, requirements, existing data; which I hoped would lead to some validating/refining the proposal by some example data that could be used to demonstrate that it met the use cases [4].

I am up for another push on courses. I share the doc I was working on [4] in the hope that it is good starting point. It's a bit long, so here is an overview of what it contains:

- scope: concerning discovery of any type of educational course (online/offline, long/short, scheduled/on-demand) Educational course defined as "some sequence of events and/or creative works which aims to build knowledge, competence or ability of learners". (out of scope: information about students and their progression etc; information needed internally for course management rather than discovery)

- comparators: a review of some established ways of sharing similar data

- use cases
- requirements arising from the use cases

- mapping to some existing examples. I used hypothes.is[5] to annotate existing web pages that describe different types of course, e.g. from Coursera or a University, tagging the requirement that the data was relevant to. Here's an example of a page as tagged: https://goo.gl/1IWjOh (click on a yellow highlight to show the relevant requirement as a comment with a tag)
hypothes.is aggregates the selected information for each tag, to give a list of the information relevant to each use case, for example https://hypothes.is/stream?q=tag:%27reqC%27
 
I think the next step would be to review the use cases and requirements in light of some of the observations from the mapping, and to look again at the proposal to see how it reflects the data available/required. But first I want to try to get more people involved, see whether anyone has a better idea for how to progress, or if anyone wants to check the work so far and help move it forward.

I'm aware the docs and discussions so far around schema for courses are a scattered set of scraps and drafts. If there is enough interest it would be really useful to have it in one place.

Phil

1. Task group at http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/AB-Comm/ed/LRMI/TG , specs at http://dublincore.org/dcx/lrmi-terms/1.1/ and general info at http://www.lrmi.net/
2. See issue 195 on github https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/195
3. https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YWjLzZC8FiTiOwSAETRIEozeqZdn6O8a4fgqK4t5Ss/edit#
4. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-s5HjNkWUtIoLAHjRcUZljBWEdHQIupk-KscAEIbFA/edit#
5. https://hypothes.is/

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Phil Barker           @philbarker
LRMI, Cetis, ICBL     http://people.pjjk.net/phil
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[Vicki Tardif Holland]

Given there are multiple documents and email threads, is there a preferred way to send comments?

- Vicki

Vicki Tardif Holland | Ontologist | vta...@google.com 

 

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[Phil Barker]

Hi Vicki, from my point of view, replies to the public-s...@w3.org would be great. Replies here (LRMI) or to the github issue would be fine too, but I am keen to have a widely visible discussion as that might prompt more people to get involved.  If the replies are really down in the detail of either the proposal doc or my working doc, then I guess comments on them might be more relevant, but perhaps flag the points at issue to the public schema list? Does that sound reasonable to you?

Looking forward to seeing what you think.

Phil.

[Dan Brickley]

(thanks for the update, Phil!)

On Fri, 4 Dec 2015 at 15:38 Vicki Tardif Holland <vta...@google.com> wrote:

Given there are multiple documents and email threads, is there a preferred way to send comments?

From a schema.org perspective, it is important to have a forum where anyone can participate, and where discussions are properly archived. I suggest we create a tightly scoped W3C Community Group focussed explicitly on improving schema.org for description of courses. This does naturally touch on various related areas - which is exactly why a public forum is needed - but let's keep a tight scope as there are plenty of existing places (like for more general discussion about educational metadata.

I like the scope description in the doc has been working on - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-s5HjNkWUtIoLAHjRcUZljBWEdHQIupk-KscAEIbFA/edit# - and which was summarized below as...

"concerning discovery of any type of educational course (online/offline, long/short, scheduled/on-demand) Educational course defined as "some sequence of events and/or creative works which aims to build knowledge, competence or ability of learners". (out of scope: information about students and their progression etc; information needed internally for course management rather than discovery)"

This doesn't directly answer Vicki's question: where to send comments. It is more about workflow for making sure all the discussion and commenting eventually feeds into improvements to schema.org. I suggest we make sure that each document has someone taking a lead, and that the document authors/editors can find their own balance between inline comments vs github/email. 

Another way of avoiding fragmentation in discussions is for us to collectively focus our attention in the same direction (rather than debate gmail vs google docs vs email vs wikis etc.). At the present time I think the requirements/usecases doc is a good place for us all to be looking:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-s5HjNkWUtIoLAHjRcUZljBWEdHQIupk-KscAEIbFA/edit#

Dan

[Phil Barker]

Thanks Dan,
Yes, as an interim measure comments and edits to the Use case doc would work. It should be open for suggestions and comments to all, but if anyone wants further access that can be requested vie the doc.

A W3C community group would be a great way of progressing this. The first step seems to be to propose a Name and short description. How about:

Name: LRMI Schema Course extension

Description
Community group initiated by LRMI to develop an extension for schema.org concerning the discovery of any type of educational course (online/offline, long/short, scheduled/on-demand). Educational course defined as "some sequence of events and/or creative works which aims to build knowledge, competence or ability of learners". (out of scope: information about students and their progression etc; information needed internally for course management rather than discovery).

Short name: schema-course-extend

Just want to run this past you all before proposing it. If anyone can improve please suggest. If anyone objects to explicitly mentioning LRMI and Schema.org please let me know. If I don't hear otherwise I will propose the group in a couple of days.

Phil

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Phil Barker           @philbarker
LRMI, Cetis, ICBL     http://people.pjjk.net/phil
Heriot-Watt University

Ubuntu: http://xkcd.com/456/
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[Phil Barker]

Hello all,
further to the invitation below to get involved with building a schema extension for educational courses, and after some discussion, I have proposed a W3C Community Group to continue this work. You can read the proposal at
https://www.w3.org/community/blog/2015/12/10/proposed-group-schema-course-extension-community-group/

If you are registered with W3C you can support the proposal, or, once a couple more people have supported it, you can join the group. I envisage kicking off the work in earnest in the New Year.

For more details on how W3C Community groups work see https://www.w3.org/community/about/

Best regards, Phil Barker

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[Phil Barker]

Well, that was quick.

With your support, the Schema Course extension Community Group has been launched:
  http://www.w3.org/community/schema-course-extend/

To join the group, please use:
 http://www.w3.org/community/schema-course-extend/join

Many thanks to those who seconded the proposal and thanks in advance to anyone who joins.

Phil

[Dan Brickley]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 2:00 PM Phil Barker <phil....@hw.ac.uk> wrote:

Well, that was quick.

With your support, the Schema Course extension Community Group has been launched:
  http://www.w3.org/community/schema-course-extend/

To join the group, please use:
 http://www.w3.org/community/schema-course-extend/join

Many thanks to those who seconded the proposal and thanks in advance to anyone who joins.

I've just taken the liberty of nominating Phil Barker as chair of the Community Group, since this reflects quite naturally the fact that Phil has been driving this work along already. From a schema.org perspective this means that we'll look to Phil as a first point of contact on the status of this work, and to help us bridge the gap between the general schema.org communication channels (email + github issues) and Course-specific discussions. But we can all do our bit on that front. For example in schema.org's Github issues we have https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/195 regarding courses. I've just dropped a link to the new CG into that group.

Phil - are you happy being chair of the Community Group? If not, I believe the W3C system now means that you have to choose who to nominate as co-chair of chair...

cheers,

Dan