course-catalog-examples

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Microformats in Education: Course Catalog

Starting a collection of research, examples, and a rationale for a microformat for course catalogs in Higher Education. - Jesse Rodgers

Todo

• Get more examples from outside of Canada: Australia, United States, UK, other EU, and hopefully some Asian and south American schools.
• Post some schema information from internal course management systems (work with what already exists)
• First idea is posted (this should be easy)

Some Microformat use in Education

Here is a list of edu sites that use microformats:

• Mays Business School at Texas A&M University in our faculty directory choose an individual and they will have an hCard and vcard. For info contact Matt Herzberger
• University of Waterloo Events - new events system that uses hCal and iCal
• Pierce College staff/faculty directory uses hCard.
• Clinical Science Program at Univ. Colorado Health Sciences Center uses iCal.
• Scottish Schools Online uses hCard.

Where could there be a need for microformats in education?

Course Catalog

A course catalog (sometimes known as a course calendar) is a collection of courses and when they are available as well as fee schedules and course dependencies.

Examples

• University of Waterloo Course Calendar - current system is set for an upgrade but as you can see the code is very inconsistent.
  • Course information is displayed with:
    • course title
    • course requirements
    • eligibility requirements
    • any notes that are relevant to that course such as any special circumstances
    • (Anthropology Example) - no class or id names present
• University of Guelph undergrad calendar - there is an attempt to assign relevant class names to table elements.

                   tr class="title"
                   a name="ANTH4300" ANTH*4300 Anthropological Issues F (3-0) [0.50]
                   tr class="description"
                   tr class="prereqs"

• Wilfried Laurier undergrad calendar
  • Anthropology example - no class or id names present
• University of Toronto - Scarborough Campus
• University of Western Ontario

Frameworks in Development

XCRI - eXchanging Course-Related Information

Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) has suggested that the XCRI project might be a good project to look with regards to an existing standard. The aim of the project is:

To define a vocabulary and appropriate technology bindings (e.g. XML, RDF) for describing course-related information that encompasses course marketing, course quality assurance, enrolment and reporting requirements.

A practical use of this standard is shown in a blog post entitled Mashups from the future: TripPlanner & XCRI by Scott Wilson. Actual XCRI software is available, including an aggregator

XCRI conducted a detailed survey of 161 course catalogs as source materials for their specification, which is described on the XCRI wiki.

Working Draft

This is a suggestion for a standardized format for displaying course catalog/ program information for educational institutions.

   div class="programDescription"
      h2  class="title"              Biology 
      div class="academicLevel"      Undergraduate Major
      div class="introCopy"          Descriptive copy about the program
      div class="features"           Distinctive features about the program
      div class="career"             Career opportunities for graduates
      div class="courses"            List of course information
      div class="programDirector"    Program Director