Seminar: Using Interactive Visualisations to Analyse the Structure and Treatment of Topics in Learning Materials

Title: Using Interactive Visualisations to Analyse the Structure and Treatment of Topics in Learning Materials

Speaker: Tanya Howden, Heriot-Watt University

Date: 11:30 on 14 May 2018

Location: CM F.17, Heriot-Watt University

Abstract: With the amount of information available online growing, it is becoming more and more difficult to find what you are looking for, particularly when you’re in an area that you have very little background in. For example, if you were learning about neural networks for the first time, the number of responses you get from a simple Google search can be overwhelming – how do you know where to start?! This is only one of the many challenges faced when searching for appropriate learning materials.

In this talk, I will be discussing the motivations behind my research interests before introducing and demonstrating a prototype that has been created with the aim to give learners a more engaging environment with unified organisation and access to different materials on one subject.

Schema course extension update

This progress update on the work to extend schema.org to support the discovery of any type of educational course is cross-posted from the Schema Course Extension W3C Community Group. If you are interested in this work please head over there. What aspects of a course can we now describe? As a result of work so far addressing … Continue reading Schema course extension update

This progress update on the work to extend schema.org to support the discovery of any type of educational course is cross-posted from the Schema Course Extension W3C Community Group. If you are interested in this work please head over there.

What aspects of a course can we now describe?
As a result of work so far addressing the use cases that we outlined, we now have answers to the following questions about how to describe courses using schema.org:

As with anything in schema.org, many of the answers proposed are not the final word on all the detail required in every case, but they form a solid basis that I think will be adequate in many instances.

What new properties are we proposing?
In short, remarkably few. Many of the aspects of a course can be described in the same way as for other creative works or events. However we did find that we needed to create two new types Course and CourseInstance to identify whether the description related to a course that could be offered at various times or a specific offering or section of that course. We also found the need for three new properties for Course: courseCode, coursePrerequisites and hasCourseInstance; and two new properties for CourseInstance: courseMode and instructor.

There are others under discussion, but I highlight these as proposed because they are being put forward for inclusion in the next release of the schema.org core vocabulary.

showing how Google will display information about courses in a search galleryMore good news:  the Google search gallery documentation for developers already includes information on how to provide the most basic info about Courses. This is where we are going 🙂

Discussion: Describing Learning Resources with schema.org

Date: 11:15, 8 August 2016

Venue: F.17. Colin Maclaurin Building, Heriot-Watt University

Lorna Johnstone is an MSc student conducting a project with Phil Barker. Her project has been examining previous efforts at resource description and requirements analysis to identify a subset of schema.org that is adequate for learning resources, demonstrating its use and evaluating its suitability.

Schema course extension progress update

I am chair of the Schema Course Extension W3C Community Group, which aims to develop an extension for schema.org concerning the discovery of any type of educational course. This progress update is cross-posted from there. If the forming-storming-norming-performing model of group development still has any currency, then I am pretty sure that February was the … Continue reading Schema course extension progress update

I am chair of the Schema Course Extension W3C Community Group, which aims to develop an extension for schema.org concerning the discovery of any type of educational course. This progress update is cross-posted from there.

If the forming-storming-norming-performing model of group development still has any currency, then I am pretty sure that February was the “storming” phase. There was a lot of discussion, much of it around the modelling of the basic entities for describing courses and how they relate to core types in schema (the Modelling Course and CourseOffering & Course, a new dawn? threads). Pleased to say that the discussion did its job, and we achieved some sort of consensus (norming) around modelling courses in two parts

Course, a subtype of CreativeWork: A description of an educational course which may be offered as distinct instances at different times and places, or through different media or modes of study. An educational course is a sequence of one or more educational events and/or creative works which aims to build knowledge, competence or ability of learners.

CourseInstance, a subtype of Event: An instance of a Course offered at a specific time and place or through specific media or mode of study or to a specific section of students.

hasCourseInstance, a property of Course with expected range CourseInstance: An offering of the course at a specific time and place or through specific media or mode of study or to a specific section of students.

(see Modelling Course and CourseInstance on the group wiki)

This modelling, especially the subtyping from existing schema.org types allows us to meet many of the requirements arising from the use cases quite simply. For example, the cost of a course instance can be provided using the offers property of schema.org/Event.

The wiki is working to a reasonable extent as a place to record the outcomes of the discussion. Working from the outline use cases page you can see which requirements have pages, and those pages that exist point to the relevant discussion threads in the mail list and, where we have got this far, describe the current solution.  The wiki is also the place to find examples for testing whether the proposed solution can be used to mark up real course information.

As well as the wiki, we have the proposal on github, which can be used to build working test instances on appspot showing the proposed changes to the schema.org site.

The next phase of the work should see us performing, working through the requirements from the use cases and showing how they can be me. I think we should focus first on those that look easy to do with existing properties of schema.org/Event and schema.org/CreativeWork.

HECoS, a new subject coding system for Higher Education

You may have missed that just before Christmas HECoS (the Higher Education Classification of Subjects) was announced. I worked a little on the project that lead up to this, along with colleagues in Cetis (who lead the project), Alan Paull Serices and Gill Ferrell, so I am especially pleased to see it come to fruition. … Continue reading HECoS, a new subject coding system for Higher Education

You may have missed that just before Christmas HECoS (the Higher Education Classification of Subjects) was announced. I worked a little on the project that lead up to this, along with colleagues in Cetis (who lead the project), Alan Paull Serices and Gill Ferrell, so I am especially pleased to see it come to fruition. I believe that as a flexible classification scheme built on semantic web / linked data principles it is a significant contribution to how we share data in HE.

HECoS was commissioned as part of the Higher Education Data & Information Improvement Programme (HEDIIP) in order to find a replacement to JACS, the subject coding scheme currently used in UK HE when information from different institutions needs to be classified by subject. When I was first approached by Gill Ferrell while she was working on a preliminary study of to determine if it needed changing, my initial response was that something which was much more in tune with semantic web principles would be very welcome (see the second part of this post that I wrote back in 2013). HECoS has been designed from the outset to be semantic web friendly. Also, one of the issues identified by the initial study was that aggregation of subjects was politically sensitive. For starters, the level of funding can depend on whether a subject is, for example, a STEM subject or not; but there are also factors of how universities as institutions are organised into departments/faculties/schools and how academics identify with disciplines. These lead to unnecessary difficulties in subject classification of courses: it is easy enough to decide whether a course is about ‘actuarial science’ but deciding whether ‘actuarial science’ should be grouped under ‘business studies’ or ‘mathematics’ is strongly context dependent. One of the decisions taken in designing HECoS was to separate the politics of how to aggregate subjects from the descriptions of those subjects and their more general relationships to each other. This is in marked contrast to JACS where the aggregation was baked into the very identifiers used. That is not to say that aggregation hierarchies aren’t important or won’t exist: they are, and they will, indeed there is already one for the purpose of displaying subjects for navigation, but they will be created through a governance process that can consider the politics involved separately from describing the subjects. This should make the subject classification terms more widely usable, allowing institutions and agencies who use it to build hierarchies for presentation and analysis that meet their own needs if these are different from those represented by the process responsible for the standard hierarchy. A more widely used classification scheme will have benefits for the information improvement envisaged by HEDIIP.

The next phase of HECoS will be about implementation and adoption, for example the creation of the governance processes detailed in the reports, moving HECoS up to proper 5-star linked data, help with migration from JACS to HECoS and so on. There’s a useful summary report on the HEDIIP site, and a spreadsheet of the coding system itself. There’s also still the development version Cetis used for consultation, which better represents its semantic webbiness but is non-definitive and temporary.

schema for courses

UPDATE: there is a new W3C community group schema course extend set up to progress these ideas. Please join if you are interested. This is essentially an invite to get involved with building a schema extension for educational courses, by way of a description of work so far. If you want to reply it’s sent … Continue reading schema for courses

UPDATE: there is a new W3C community group schema course extend set up to progress these ideas. Please join if you are interested.

This is essentially an invite to get involved with building a schema extension for educational courses, by way of a description of work so far. If you want to reply it’s sent as an email schema.org mail list.

About a year ago there was a flurry of discussion about wanting to markup descriptions of courses in schema. Vicky Tardiff-Holland produced a proposal 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 hope will lead to validating/refining the proposal by some example data that could be used to demonstrate that it met the use cases.

I am up for another push on courses. I share the doc I was working on 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 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 (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 cost

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.

Finally, 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.

A short project on linking course data

Alasdair Gray and I have had Anna Grant working with us for the last 12 weeks on an Equate Scotland Technology Placement project looking at how we can represent course information as linked data. As I wrote at the beginning of the project, for me this was of interest in relation to work on the use of schema.org … Continue reading A short project on linking course data

Alasdair Gray and I have had Anna Grant working with us for the last 12 weeks on an Equate Scotland Technology Placement project looking at how we can represent course information as linked data. As I wrote at the beginning of the project, for me this was of interest in relation to work on the use of schema.org to describe courses; for the department as a whole it relates to how we can access course-related information internally to view information such as the articulation of related learning outcomes from courses at different stages of a programme, and how data could be published and linked to datasets from other organisations such as accrediting bodies or funders. We avoided any student-related data such as enrolments and grades. The objectives for Anna’s work were ambitious: survey existing HE open data and ontologies in use; design an ontology that we can use; develop an interface we can use to create and publish our course data. Anna made great progress on all three fronts. Most of what follows is lifted from her report.

(Aside: at HW we run 4-year programmes in computer science which are composed of courses; I know many other institution run 3/4-year courses which are comprised of modules. Talking more generally, course is usefully ambiguous to cover both levels of granularity; programme and module seem unambiguous.)

A few Universities have already embarked on a similar projects, notably the Open University, Oxford University and Southampton University in the UK, and Muenster and the American University of Beirut elsewhere. Southampton was one of the first Universities to take the open linked data approached and as such they developed their own bespoke ontology. Oxford has predominantly used the XCRI ontology (see below for information on the standard education ontologies mentioned here) to represent data, additionally they have used MLO, dcterms, skos and a few resource types that they have defined in their own ontology. The Open University has the richest data available, the approach they took was to use many ontologies. Muenster developed the TEACH ontology, and the American University of Beirut used the CourseWare and AIISO ontologies.

The ontologies reviewed were: AIISO, Teach, CourseWare, XCRI, MLO, ECIM and CEDS. A live working draft of the summary / review for these is available for comment as a Google Doc.

Aiiso (Academic Institution Internal Structure Ontology) is an excellent ontology for what it is designed for but as it says, it aims to describe the structure of an institution and doesn’t offer a huge amount in the way of particular properties of a course. Teach is a better fit in terms of having the kind of properties that we wished to use to describe a course, however doesn’t give any kind of representation of the provider of the course. CourseWare is a simple ontology with only four classes and many properties with with Course as the domain, the trouble with this ontology is that it is closely related to the Aktors ontology which is no longer defined anywhere online.

XCRI and MLO are designed for the advertising of courses and as such they miss out some of the features of a course that would be represented in internal course descriptions such as assessment method and learning outcomes.  Neither of these ontologies show the difference between a programme and a module. ECIM is an extension of MLO which provides a common format for representing credits awarded for completion of a learning opportunity.

CEDS (Common Education Data Standards) is an American ontology which provides a shared vocabulary for educational data from preschool right up to adult education.  The benefits of which are, that data can be compared and exchanged in a consistent way.  It has data domains for assessment, learning standards, learning resources, authentication and authorisation.  Additionally it provides domains for different stages of education e.g. post-secondary education. CEDS is ambitious in that it represents all levels of education and as such is a very complex and detailed ontology.

XCRI, MLO (+ ECIM) and CEDS can be grouped together in that they differentiate between a course specification and a course instance, offering or section.  The specification being the parts of a course that remain consistent from one presentation to the next, whereas the instance defines those aspects of a course that vary between presentations for example location or start date. The advantage of this is that there will be a smaller amount of data that will require updating between years/offerings.

An initial draft of a Heriot Watt schema applying all the ontologies available was made. It was a mess, however it became apparent the MLO was the predominant ontology.  So we chose to use MLO where possible and then use other ontologies where required.  This iteration  resulted in a course instance becoming both an MLO learning opportunity instance and a TEACH course in order to be able to use all the properties required.  Even using this mix of ontologies we still needed to mint our own terms.  This approach was a bit complex and TEACH does not seem to be widely used, we therefore decided to use MLO alone and extend it to fit our data in a similar way that already started by ECIM.

The final draft is shown below. Key:  Green= MLO, Purple=MLO extension, Blue=ECIM / previous alteration to MLO Yellow= generic ontologies such as Dublin core and SKOS.  In brief, we used subtypes of MLO Learning Opportunities to describe both programmes and modules. The distinction between information that is at the course specification level and that which is at the course instance level was made on the basis of whether changing the information required committee approval. So things that can be changed year on year without approval such as location, course leader and other teaching staff are associated with course instance; things that are more stable and require approval such as syllabus, learning outcomes, assessment methods are at course specification level.

mloExtension2

We also created some instance data for Computer Science courses at Heriot-Watt. For this we use Semantic MediaWiki (with the Semantic bundle). Semantic forms were used for inputting course information, the input from the forms is then shown as a wiki page. Categories in mediawiki are akin to classes, properties are used to link one page to another and also to relate the subject of the page to its associated literals. An input form has the properties inbuilt such that each field in the form has a property related to it. Essentially the item described by the form will become the object in the stored triple, the property associated with a field within the form will form the predicate of the stored triple and the input to the field will form the subject of a triple. A field can be set such that multiple values can be entered if separated by commas, and in this case a triple will be formed for each value.  I think there is a useful piece of work that could be done comparing various tools for creating linked data (e.g. Semantic MediaWiki, Calimachus, Marmotta) and evaluating whether other approaches (e.g. WordPress extensions) may improve on them. If you know of anything along such lines please let me know.

We have little more work to do in representing the ontology in Protege and creating more instance data, watch this space for updates and a more detailed description than the image above. We would also like to evaluate the ontology more fully against potential use cases and against other institutions data.

Anna has finished her work here now and returns to Edinburgh Napier University to finish her Master’s project. Alasdair and I think she has done a really impressive job, not least considering she had no previous experience with RDF and semantic technologies. We’ve also found her a pleasure to work with and would like to thank her for her efforts on this project.

Two projects about describing courses

I’m currently involved in a couple of projects relating to representing course information as linked data / schema.org. 1. Course information in schema.org As you may know the idea of using LRMI / schema.org for describing courses has been mooted several times over the last two or three years, here and on the main schema.org … Continue reading Two projects about describing courses

I’m currently involved in a couple of projects relating to representing course information as linked data / schema.org.

1. Course information in schema.org

As you may know the idea of using LRMI / schema.org for describing courses has been mooted several times over the last two or three years, here and on the main schema.org mail lists. Most recently, Wes Turner opened an issue on github which attracted some attention and some proposed solutions.

I lead a work package within the DCMI LRMI Task Group to try to take this forwards. To that end I and some colleagues in the Task Group have given some thought to what the scope and use cases to be addressed might be, mostly relating to course advertising and discovery. You can see our notes as a Google Doc, you should be able to add comments to this document and we would welcome your thoughts. In particular we would like to know whether there are any missing use cases or requirements. Other offers of help and ideas would also be welcome!

I plan to compare the derived requirements with the proposed solutions and with the data typically provided in web pages.

2. Institutional course data as linked data

Stefan Dietze commented on the schema.org course information work that it would be worth looking at similar existing vocabularies. That linked nicely with some other work that a colleague, Anna Grant, is undertaking, looking at how we might represent and use course data from our department as linked data (this is similar to some of the work I saw presented in the Linked Learning workshop in Florence). She is reviewing the relevant vocabularies that we can find (AIISO, TEACH, XCRI-CAP, CourseWare, MLO, CEDS). There is a working draft on which we would welcome comments.

Linked learning highlights from Florence #LILE2015

I was lucky enough to go to Florence for some of the pre WWW2015 conference workshops because Stefan Dietze invited me to talk at the Linked Learning workshop “Learning & Education with the Web of Data“. Rather than summarize everything I saw I would like to give brief pointers to three presentations from that workshop and the “Web-base … Continue reading Linked learning highlights from Florence #LILE2015

davidI was lucky enough to go to Florence for some of the pre WWW2015 conference workshops because Stefan Dietze invited me to talk at the Linked Learning workshop “Learning & Education with the Web of Data“. Rather than summarize everything I saw I would like to give brief pointers to three presentations from that workshop and the “Web-base Education Technologies” (WebET 2015) workshop that followed it that were personal highlights. Many thanks to Stefan for organizing the conference (and also to the Spanish company Gnoss for sponsoring it).

Semantic TinCan

I’ve followed the work on Tin Can / xAPI / Experience API since its inception. Lorna and I put a section about it into our Cetis Briefing on Activity Data and Paradata, so I was especially interested in Tom De Nies‘s presentation on TinCan2PROV: Exposing Interoperable Provenance of Learning Processes Through Experience API Logs. Tin Can statements are basically elaborations of “I did this,” providing more information about the who, how and what referred to by those three words. Tom has a background in provenance metadata and saw the parallel between those statements and the recording of actions by agents more generally, and specifically with the model behind the W3C PROV ontology for recording information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing. Showing that TinCan can be mapped to W3C PROV is of more than academic interest: the TinCan spec provides only one binding, JSON but the first step of Tom’s work was to upgrade that to JSON-LD and then through the mapping to PROV allow any of the serializations for PROV to be used (RDF/XML, N3, JSON-LD), and to bring the Tin Can statements into a format that allows them to be used by semantic technologies. Tom is hopeful that the mapping is lossless, you can try it yourself at tincan2prov.org.

Linking Courses

I also have an increasing interest in the semantic representation of courses, there’s some interest in adding Courses to schema.org, but also within my own department some of us would like to explore advantages of moving away from course descriptors as PDF documents to something that could be a little more connected with each other and the outside world. Fouad Zablith’s presentation on Interconnecting and Enriching Higher Education Programs using Linked Data was like seeing the end point of that second line of interest. The data model Fouad uses combines a model of a course with information about the concepts taught and the learning materials used to teach them. Course information is recorded using Semantic MediaWiki to produce both human readable and linked data representations of the courses across a program of study. A bookmarklet allows information about resources that are useful for these courses to be added to the graph–but importantly attached via the concept that is studied, and so available to students of any course that teaches that concept. Finally, on the topic of several courses teaching the same concepts, sometimes such repetition is deliberate, but sometimes it is unwanted.

Showing which concepts (middle) from one course (left) occur in other courses (right). Image from Fouad Zablith's presentation (see link in text)
Showing which concepts (middle) from one course (left) occur in other courses (right). Image from Fouad Zablith’s presentation (see link in text)

Fouad  showed how analysis of the concept – course part of the graph could be useful it surfacing cases of where there were perhaps too many concepts in a course that had been previously covered elsewhere (see image, above)

Linking Resources

One view of a course (that makes especial sense to anyone who thinks about etymology) is that it is a learning pathway, and one view of a pathway is as an Directed Acyclic Graph, i.e. an ordered route through a series of resources.  In the WebET workshop,  Andrea Zielinski presented A Case Study on the Use of Semantic Web Technologies for Learner Guidance which modelled such a learning pathway as a directed graph and represented this graph using OWL 2 DL.  The conclusion to her paper says “The approach is applicable in the Semantic Web context, where distributed resources often are already annotated according to metadata standards and various open-source domain and user ontologies exist. Using the reasoning framework, they can be sequenced in a meaningful and user-adaptive way.” But at this stage the focus is on showing that the expressivity of OWL 2 DL is enough to represent a learning pathway and testing the efficiency of querying such graphs.