Learning Outcomes in Course

[njall]

Learning Outcomes are valuable for learners to make decisions about whether a course is appropriate for them, and for training providers to have a clear checklist for what to deliver.

I would like to propose adding learningOutcome as a property with a definition of:

Statements that describe what knowledge, skills or abilities students should acquire on completion of this Course.

[philbarker]

See teaches in issue #2427 and associated PR. Defined as "The item being described is intended to help a person learn the competency defined by the referenced term." Would be inherited by Course.

[jmarks]

Niall, The LRMI workgroup has focused on this issue of alignments or learning resources to to "Competency Frameworks". In Schema there are "Defined Terms" https://schema.org/DefinedTerm, which can be used to express learning objectives and outcomes, and can be used with other standards for this such as IMS Global CASE https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/case and standards repositories like https://casenetwork.imsglobal.org/. We believe between the Alignment object and defined terms you have everything you need to define learning objectives and content alignments to those objectives. Joshua Marks Public Consulting Groups LRMI

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On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 7:09 AM Niall Beard ***@***.***> wrote: Learning Outcomes are valuable for learners to make decisions about whether a course is appropriate for them, and for training providers to have a clear checklist for what to deliver. I would like to propose adding *learningOutcome* as a property with a definition of: Statements that describe what knowledge, skills or abilities students should acquire on completion of this Course. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2432?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAKCD5K7XUTTUEYMFIL53HDQZOFD7A5CNFSM4J5ISNYKYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFUVEXG43VMWVGG33NNVSW45C7NFSM4IBVNJEQ>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAKCD5KF5SWDPQZ3X5SQLQ3QZOFD7ANCNFSM4J5ISNYA> .

[njall]

Thanks Phill and Joshua.

@jmarks - I'm not sure I understand. I see that Course has the educationalAlignment property which is of type AlignmentObject. But I can't see any usage of a property with DefinedTerm as the type.
The definition for educationalAlignment doesn't fit well with free-text learning outcomes, as there is no established framework to define: "An alignment to an established educational framework.".

If this property were to be used - a content aggregator looking to exploit schema.org implementations such as TeSS would not be able to infer whether educationalAlignment was being used for its intended purpose or if it were being used for Learning Outcomes.

teaches could work! I would say Learning Outcomes are short, tangible outcomes learners would accomplish, particularly useful for helping prospective learners with decision-making. teaches is a lot more open and would likely be used as free text paragraphs, but would be more applicable for those who don't use learning outcomes. I'm not sure what the policy is for deciding

[philbarker]

@njall the intent is that teaches can be used to point to (intended) learning outcomes & learning objectives, whether they be drawn from an established framework or defined ad hoc by the teacher. "Competency" as used in the definition proposed for teaches is often defined in terms of "knowledge, skill or ability", same as the definition of learning outcome that you use. The property name teaches was chosen to match one of the current recomended values for alignmentType, and it is perhaps a bit more understandable by people who aren't professional teachers, trainers, instructional designers etc. It's part of a trio: requires/teaches/assesses; one issue with "learning outcome" is that when applied to things other than courses it could be ambiguous as to whether the resource teaches or assesses the LO.

If you can think of anything change that might make the intent that teaches is designed for (intended) learning outcomes more clear please add it to the discussion for issue #2427 or PR #2428 Of course, if you think there are problems with teaches and still prefer something around learning outcome, mention that!

[stuartasutton]

@njall, there is nothing to preclude the declaration of the outcomes in a course (even one where different instructors of a course use different, but hopefully mutually aligned) as members if a "framework". In fact, to weave a useful fabric of learning outcomes aligned with programatic or institutional academic standards which also might be aligned to standards prescribed by a professional or academic society, those course-level outcomes should be declared as frameworks with outcome URIs etc. However, even if outcomes do not defined URIs for identification and linking, DefinedTerms can be used since those learning outcomes are in fact quire formally declared in a course syllabus as a kind of contract with the learner...that's enough formality for me.

[RichardWallis]

Implemented in commit 0c1fbee