USE CASE: Describing Course and Curriculum Materials

[philbarker]

Creator: Phil Barker

Problem statement

We wish to share relatively large amounts of content and curriculum materials relating to educational courses, for example: all the activities, student learning resources, teacher and parent curriculum guides, formative assessments, etc relating to one school-year of study in a subject such as mathematics.

We wish for the metadata to facilitate the editing, adaptation and reuse of the resources. For example teachers should be able to substitute resources/activities with others addressing the same objective as they see fit. Or course designers should be able pull out all the resources of a particular type (say activity plans), about a given topic, or addressing a specific learning outcome and use them in a new course. In some cases alternate equivalent content may be provided, for example online Vs offline content or to provide accessible provision for people with disabilities.

We wish for these to be discoverable on the open web at both broad and fine levels of granularity, i.e. whole courses and the individual parts should be discoverable via search engines.

We have decided to use the following vocabularies to describe the structure and content of the material: schema.org + LRMI, OERSchema and local extensions where necessary.

Stakeholders

Original content providers who create and publish curriculum and course materials using existing systems and already have (local) terminology for many aspects of resource description.

Content processors take the original content and offer it through their own systems. They also have (different) terminology for many aspects of resource description

Content purchasers wish to discover and buy content that meets their requirements

Course designers and Teachers use the content that has been purchased and wish to adapt it for their students

Parents wish to understand what and how their students are being taught

Learners want a seamless experience using high quality materials and ideas, in which all the work above is invisible.

Links

See K12OCX

Requirements

The application profile must reference evolving specifications: schema.org, OERSchema, various controlled vocabularies/concept schemes/encoding schemes and local extensions. If a local extension is adopted by one of the more widely recognised specifications it should be easy to modify the application profile to reflect this.

The application profile must include a content model that meets the following requirements for describing the structure of content:

• identify the distinct types of entity involved (Course, Unit, Lesson, Supporting Material, Audience, Learning Objectives, Assessments etc)
• show the hierarchy of the content (i.e. the Course comprises Units, the Units comprise Lessons, the Lessons comprise Activities)
• show related content that is not part of the hierarchy but is related to (e.g. information about Units for teachers and parents, content to be used in the Activities)
• show the ordering of sequential content
• show options for alternative equivalent content

The application profile must specify optional (may), desired (should) and required (must) descriptive metadata as appropriate for each type of entity. For example

• Activities must have a learning Time
• an Activity should have a name
• any resource may be associated with an Audience

The application profile must specify cardinality. for example:

• Courses must have one and only one title
• Units must have one or more Lesson
• Units may have one or more Assessment

There may be alternative ways of satisfying a requirement

• Courses must associated with either one or more Lesson or one or more Unit
• If there is more than one Lesson in a Unit or Course, the Lessons must be ordered

The application profile must specify the expected type or value space for any property

• this may be more restrictive than the base specification
• this may extent the base specification
• this may include alternatives (e.g. free text or reference concept from controlled scheme)

Comments

[philbarker]

@kcoyle this needs tagging as a use case. Don't know why I'm not seeing the gear wheel icon next to labels that would let me do this.

[kcoyle]

Phil, in terms of ordering, would it satisfy your use case if the profile contains an "order by" element? Also, I'm interpreting your "show the hierarchy of the content" to be relationships between entities, with the ability to define that one entity (unit) is defined subordinate to another (course). Is that correct?

[philbarker]

Hierarchy: yes, I think you have it right. A course may have several units, each unit may have several lessons and and each lesson may have several activities.
Ordering: within a course we need to show the order of the units, within a unit the order of the lessons and within a lesson the order of the activities. An "order by" element would work if it could be applied to a part of the hierarchy (or I suppose a type of entity, because lesson 5 will come after lesson 4 even if they are in different units) and if there is an element in the schema to order by (e.g. a "lesson index"). What I actually had in mind was bringing in to the profile something like OAI-ORE or rdf:List / rdf:Seq which express hierarchies and ordering directly.
I think the general requirement is for a content model, to help people understand how the terms are to be used, e.g. in this case, what it is that is being ordered into an rdf:Seq.