Competency Object and linkage to regional/national educational standards

[Steve Griffin]

I know the comment period for .7 is over, but can someone provide some
clarification as to how the competency object is designed to be used
with existing educational standards. e.g. Common Core? The defined
property taxonomy makes sense but I fail to see how a text value is
going to help enable connection to standards that publishers must link
to for teachers looking for content. I would think a URL or text plus
a URL to the standard would suffice. It is a one to many (object ->
state or country 1 competency, state or country 2 competency, etc.)
relationship, but I could see making the assumption that mapping
services via various educational repository sites would enable a
single link from the object's metadata and let the "many" relationship
be handled by the repositories versus the harder task of LRMI/
Schema.org tackling the problem of a competency taxonomy repository.

Hopefully, I am just missing something in the intended schema.

Thanks
Steve Griffin
CTO Carson-Dellosa Publishing

[Dan Brickley]

Steve raises a good point. As it happens I'm also looking into this for schema.org in general right now, e.g. how to use constrained values from existing initiatives. 

We should make sure this works well, so some examples are key. Could someone sketch how this is currently expected to work with LRMI (ideally with markup examples)? Perhaps using the standards announced recently in https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/lrmi/V9SD--DSCqY ?

cheers,

Dan

[Greg Grossmeier]

Hello Steve,

My response below.

<quote name="Steve Griffin" date="2012-02-23" time="04:52:37 -0800">

> I know the comment period for .7 is over, but can someone provide some
> clarification as to how the competency object is designed to be used
> with existing educational standards. e.g. Common Core? The defined
> property taxonomy makes sense but I fail to see how a text value is
> going to help enable connection to standards that publishers must link
> to for teachers looking for content. I would think a URL or text plus
> a URL to the standard would suffice.

This is actually what our proposal says, albeit slightly opaquely.

Each Competency takes a CompetencyObject. The CompetencyObject has these
properties:

Property Expected Type Description
description Text A short description of the item.
image URL URL of an image of the item.
name Text The name of the item.
url URL URL of the item.
alignmentType Text The alignment relationship between the
resource and the competency.
Acceptable values: assesses, teaches,
requires, or textComplexity.

The key things there are: URL and alignmentType. URL will take the URL
of the competency/skill standard (eg: a URL that describes a specific
Common Core standard). alignmentType will take one of those 4 expected
values to give the metadata parser an idea of the way in which the
material interacts with the referenced standard.

> It is a one to many (object ->
> state or country 1 competency, state or country 2 competency, etc.)
> relationship, but I could see making the assumption that mapping
> services via various educational repository sites would enable a
> single link from the object's metadata and let the "many" relationship
> be handled by the repositories versus the harder task of LRMI/
> Schema.org tackling the problem of a competency taxonomy repository.

I think I understand what you are saying here and I'll just note that
schema.org and thus LRMI allow you to have multiple (repeating) tags of
the same type on the page. Thus, a material could teach 3 different
standards, assess 1, requires 5, and is of a specific text complexity.

> Hopefully, I am just missing something in the intended schema.

Let me know if this addresses your concerns.

All the best,

Greg

[Dan Brickley]

Any chance of a full example? Even schema people don't always read
schemas so easily!

Maybe using a video -
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/02/using-schemaorg-markup-for-videos.html
was just announced - and I'm talking with folk about also improving
the TV/radio coverage of schema.org, see
http://www.w3.org/wiki/TVRadioSchema

To get specific -- how would we use LRMI to describe the open
courseware materials from Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra classes?

These seem to be in the Web in various ways, but
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/
for starters. We could take the whole bundle of materials, or a
specific lecture mid-way through e.g.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/video-lectures/lecture-12-graphs-networks-incidence-matrices/

...on that page there are 'download this video' links, as well as link
to a streaming site. What could be added there?

cheers,

Dan

[Steve Midgley]

At least in terms of Common Core, we need definitive URLs (as IDs) for
the common core standards before anyone can generate definitive,
complete examples. Today it is possible to use ASN URLs which are
publicly accessible. It might be possible to also use Academic
Benchmarks IDs (GUIDs) but not yet in public to the best of my
knowledge.

I believe that CCSSO & NGA (the stewards of common core) will release
definitive URL IDs soon, and once that happens a complete, official
example is possible.

But we should be able to generate examples with everything but the URL
filled out (or filled out using ASN or other publicly available non-
official URL) in the meantime.

I hope this input is useful,
Steve

[Diny Golder]

Please know that the ASN is designed and widely used to handle this need. ASN data can be accessed for free at http://asn.jesandco.org

Regards,

Diny

Diny Golder | Executive Director, JES & Co. | www.JESandCo.org | www.theGateway.org | http://asn.JESandCo.org

[Kelly Peet]

Academic Benchmarks also offers free access to our copy of the Common Core.

http://www.academicbenchmarks.org/search/?state=CC&org_type=CCSSO

More than 90% of our customers have downloaded a copy of the Common Core standards in one of many XML formats tailored to their machine-readable and specific work flow needs.  The AB GUIDs, provided in any XML format, for the Common Core and any other standards in our collection of 2.6M records, can be resolved freely at http://www.academicbenchmarks.org/.

Though, as Steve notes, it appears that the CCSSO and NGA are planning to release an official machine-readable format along with official IDs, in the spring 2012.  It remains to be seen how they will address those states choosing to exercise the 15% rule.  Academic Benchmarks is planning to offer those altered versions, as well as cross-walking services (between "rogue" and "official" copies) freely to the education community.

We also offer another free service of tracking on the Common Core happenings:

http://academicbenchmarks.com/common-corner
kelly

[Steve Midgley]

Thanks Kelly. That first link doesn't work for me, maybe b/c I've used
the search in the past. I just get a screen asking for my email
address (which is fine for user HTML, but if that's a web service,
maybe you could lift the restriction as machines won't know to fill
out the form?)..

Steve

On Feb 27, 4:57 pm, Kelly Peet <ke...@academicbenchmarks.com> wrote:
> Academic Benchmarks also offers free access to our copy of the Common Core.
>
> http://www.academicbenchmarks.org/search/?state=CC&org_type=CCSSO
>
> More than 90% of our customers have downloaded a copy of the Common Core
> standards in one of many XML formats tailored to their machine-readable and
> specific work flow needs.  The AB GUIDs, provided in any XML format, for
> the Common Core and any other standards in our collection of 2.6M records,

> can be resolved freely athttp://www.academicbenchmarks.org/.

>
> Though, as Steve notes, it appears that the CCSSO and NGA are planning to
> release an official machine-readable format along with official IDs, in the
> spring 2012.  It remains to be seen how they will address those states
> choosing to exercise the 15% rule.  Academic Benchmarks is planning to
> offer those altered versions, as well as cross-walking services (between
> "rogue" and "official" copies) freely to the education community.
>
> We also offer another free service of tracking on the Common Core
> happenings:
>
> http://academicbenchmarks.com/common-corner
> kelly
>

[Kelly Peet]

Thanks Steve.  You hit the 'reg wall', presumably using a browser - our way of tracking human visitors -  which admittedly would be clunky for a machine.  We threw this in place to mildly thwart HTML scraping in automation, in lieu of a more reliable API-key-based mechanism that returns XML.  Since the volume is not overwhelming, we monitor visitor logs to this reg-wall, and offer an API key access (for tracking usage) to legitimately-interested parties.  In some ways, not unlike how you can embed a google search on your own site.
kelly

[Steve Midgley]

Ok - got it. Makes sense. API keys seem great for managing that kind
of thing. Thanks.

[Greg Grossmeier]

Thanks Diny. I have added the two general Common Core standards to
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Promulgators

Let me know if I should change anything there to be more clear/correct.

Best,

Greg

<quote name="Diny Golder" date="2012-02-27" time="12:48:34 -0500">

[Diny Golder]

Thanks, Greg.

In the Promulgators column you have "Standards Network" and it should say "Achievement Standards Network" and it should link to http://asn.jesandco.org

The base URLs for the Math and ELA look good.

Diny

[Greg Grossmeier]

Thanks for catching my bad copy/paste, Diny!

Greg

<quote name="Diny Golder" date="2012-02-28" time="18:11:06 -0500">

[Stuart Sutton]

Greg, can we give consideration to whether we are using the term "promulgator" at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Promulgators as well (or clearly) as we might?  As I have seen the term used, the _creators_ of a set of content standards or competencies are the "promulgators" while any number of 3rd party entities might make those standards/competencies reliably available in forms useful to humans and machines.  Thus, a department of education in a U.S. state or some national entity promulgates a set of competencies controlling in their jurisdiction.  But, they may or may not make what they promulgate available in a "useful" form (e.g., machine readable).  Any number of 3rd parties might then make such useful instances of the standards or competencies reliably available. 

So define,  neither Achievement Standards Network or Academic Benchmarks  at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Promulgators are "promulgators"; while (I assume) the UK Department of Education would be a promulgator with jurisdictional authority over what is in the UK school curriculum.  In some (many) cases, the promulgators do not make machine processable versions of their competencies available and don't see doing so as part of their mission (or at least do not see it that way at the moment).    So, given that there is a distinction to be drawn between the promulgators of competencies and 3rd parties that make them reliably available, wouldn't it be useful to add columns to the listing table that designates whether the entity listed is the promulgator or a third party provider--and which of those two provide machine processable/dereferenceable versions?

Stuart   

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Greg Grossmeier <gr...@creativecommons.org> wrote:

[NOTE: A request for action in bullet point 1 below, thanks!]

Agreed.

First of all my apologies on the lack of updates/examples in a timely
manner. I have been at half-time for the past few weeks, and off
full-time since mid-december due to the arrival of my first son; what a
handfull!

(I can't remember if I told the whole TWG that information before or if
just on a call.)

So the two big things are:

1. A list of competency promulgators and suggested vocabularies for the
terms that need it (eg: intendedEndUserRole, edcuationalUse,
interactivityType, and learningResourceType.)

 TWG members: Please reply to this email with known promulgators of
 vocabularies and competencies to address the needs of the above terms.
 Many of the above terms are based on LOM terminology, if that can help
 guide your work. Please provide the term being addressed and the url
 of the promulgator/vocabulary.

2. Fleshing out of examples, real or made up (but preferably many real).

 TWG members: This will be the next step after collecting a few of the
 promulgators and vocabularies above.


Best,

Greg


<quote name="Joshua Marks" date="2012-02-23" time="14:21:33 -0800">
> Greg,
>
> We really need to provide a rich selections of examples and address the open
> issue of suggested vocabularies and competency promulgators. Perhaps a
> working group call and development of a set of exemplars and a vocabulary
> reference list is needed and timely?
>
> We seem to have some momentum, but it needs a bit of a push.
>

--
Stuart A. Sutton,
CEO and Managing Director, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Associate Professor Emeritus, The Information School
University of Washington

[Alan Paull]

Maybe 'producer' for the organisation that publishes the machine readable version? Which leaves promulgator for the organisation responsible for the vocabulary (but not necessarily for publishing it).

 

Alan Paull

 

--

 

Alan Paull

APS Ltd

58 Norton Wood, Forest Green, Nailsworth, STROUD, GL6 0HG UK

al...@alanpaull.co.uk

+44 1453 835009

Skype: alanepaull

+44 7977 120886

[Greg Grossmeier]

Hi Dan,

<quote name="Dan Brickley" date="2012-02-23" time="23:16:02 +0100">

> Any chance of a full example? Even schema people don't always read
> schemas so easily!

Sorry about the delay, but here is one I just added to the Examples page:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Examples#LRMI_Example_Markup

See the CNX one (the second one as of now).

I chose that example as it had an easy way to map it to one Common Core
competency (ie, a competency standard I was at least passingly familiar
with :) ).

Best,

Greg

[Greg Grossmeier]

Thanks Stuart and Alan for your input here. To be honest, I was naive in
my use of promulgator. Thankfully, Stuart is always so kind to point out
in clear language why some of my choices are naive :).

I will amend the table of entries to include a designation of
promulgator vs not and machine readable vs not.

Thanks!

Greg

<quote name="Alan Paull" date="2012-03-06" time="07:46:58 +0000">

> Maybe 'producer' for the organisation that publishes the machine readable version? Which leaves promulgator for the organisation responsible for the vocabulary (but not necessarily for publishing it).
>
> Alan Paull
>
> --
>
> Alan Paull
> APS Ltd
> 58 Norton Wood, Forest Green, Nailsworth, STROUD, GL6 0HG UK
> al...@alanpaull.co.uk
> +44 1453 835009
> Skype: alanepaull
> +44 7977 120886
>
>
>
> From: lr...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lr...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stuart Sutton
> Sent: 05 March 2012 23:03
> To: lrmi...@googlegroups.com; LRMI
> Subject: Re: [LRMI TWG] Call for list of Promulgators and Suggested Vocabularies
>
> Greg, can we give consideration to whether we are using the term "promulgator" at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Promulgators as well (or clearly) as we might? As I have seen the term used, the _creators_ of a set of content standards or competencies are the "promulgators" while any number of 3rd party entities might make those standards/competencies reliably available in forms useful to humans and machines. Thus, a department of education in a U.S. state or some national entity promulgates a set of competencies controlling in their jurisdiction. But, they may or may not make what they promulgate available in a "useful" form (e.g., machine readable). Any number of 3rd parties might then make such useful instances of the standards or competencies reliably available.
>
> So define, neither Achievement Standards Network or Academic Benchmarks at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Promulgators are "promulgators"; while (I assume) the UK Department of Education would be a promulgator with jurisdictional authority over what is in the UK school curriculum. In some (many) cases, the promulgators do not make machine processable versions of their competencies available and don't see doing so as part of their mission (or at least do not see it that way at the moment). So, given that there is a distinction to be drawn between the promulgators of competencies and 3rd parties that make them reliably available, wouldn't it be useful to add columns to the listing table that designates whether the entity listed is the promulgator or a third party provider--and which of those two provide machine processable/dereferenceable versions?
>
> Stuart

[Jim Goodell]

In the Connexions example I see a hyperlink to ASN, but I'm wondering
if the competency object should be there with the url property set to
the same. (The human-clickable hyperlink may be to something else.
The example page just happens to have a human-readable description
with a hyperlink, but it seems the url property within a competency
object is required for machine readable context.)

I'm thinking instead of:
<li itemprop="competency" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/
CompetencyObject">
<meta itemprop="alignmentType" content="teaches"><a itemprop="name"
href="http://asn.jesandco.org/resources/S11435AF">Determine whether
two events are mutually exclusive and whether two events are
independent.</a></li>

Add a meta tag like this:
<li itemprop="competency" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/
CompetencyObject">
<meta itemprop="alignmentType" content="teaches"><meta itemprop="url"
content="http://asn.jesandco.org/resources/S11435AF">

...Insert here the content that actually teaches the competency
(video, page content, etc.), or a hyperlink to that resource, rather
than a hyperlink to the competency...

</li>


XML is not my area of expertise so please excuse my ignorance if I'm
off on this.

jg