Educational and Occupational Credentials in schema.org Community Group
The aim of this community group is to show how educational and occupational credentials may be described with schema.org, and to propose any additional terms for schema.org that may be necessary. Educational and Occupational Credentials are defined as diplomas, academic degrees, certifications, qualifications, badges, etc., that a person can obtain through learning, education and/or training. They are typically awarded on successful completion of an assessment of relevant capabilities. See also the Connecting Credentials glossary of credentialing terms.
Related work includes: the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) developed for the Credential Engine; IMS Global's Badge Alliance; and, the W3C Verifiable Claims Working Group. The work of this group will complement these, with a focus on integration with schema.org and on describing a credential that is being offered rather than the claim to posses one.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
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The new terms developed by this community group were added to the pending area in the April 2019 release of schema.org. This marks a natural endpoint for this round of our work. You can see most of the outcome under EducationalOccupationalCredential. As it says, these terms are now “proposed for full integration into Schema.org, pending implementation feedback and adoption from applications and websites”.
Please use these terms widely where you wish to meet the use cases outlined in the previous post, and feel free to use this group to discuss any issues that arise from implementation and adoption.
Over the past few months we have been working systematically through the 30-or-so outline use cases for describing Educational and Occupational Credentials in schema.org, suggesting how they can be met with existing schema.org terms, or failing that working on proposals for new terms to add. Here I want to summarize the progress against these use cases, inviting review of our solutions and closure of any outstanding issues.
Use cases enabled
The list below summarizes information from the community group wiki for those use cases that we have addressed, with links to the outline use case description, the wiki page showing how we met the requirements arising from that use case, and proposed new terms on a test instance of schema.org (may be slow to load). I tried to be inclusive / exhaustive in what I have called out as an issue.
The following use cases have not been addressed; either they were identified as low priority or there was insufficient consensus as to how to enable them:
1.9 Assessment (see issue 5, no way to represent assessments in schema.org)
As well as the unaddressed use cases above, there are some caveats about the way other use cases have been addressed. I have tried to be inclusive / exhaustive in what I have called out as an issue,–I hope many of them can be acknowledged and left for future contributions to schema.org, we just need to clarify that they have been.
Issue 1: whether EducationalOccupationalCredential is a subtype of CreativeWork or Intangible.
Issue 2: competenceRequired only addresses the simplest case of individual required competencies.
Issue 3: whether accreditation is a form of recognition.
Issue 4: the actual renewal / maintenance requirements aren’t specified.
Issue 5: there is no way represent Assessments in schema.org
Issue 6: there is no explicit guidance on how to show required learning materials for a Course in schema.org.
There is an issues page on the wiki for tracking progress in disposing of these issues.
Summary of proposed changes to schema.org
Many of the use cases were addressed using terms that already exist in schema.org. The changes we currently propose are
We had a community group kick off call on Monday 27 November. This was well attended and allowed us to come to some initial agreements about the parameters for the projected work. The slides I used are available here (pdf) and on Google Slides, but they were just my initial thoughts, this summary takes on board the comments that were made during the meeting.
Aims and priorities
We had a good discussion about the aims and priorities of the group. We agreed that the wording currently used to define educational and occupational credentials needed to be softened a little, to be more explicit that some credentials might be granted without assessment, that not all learning is formal, and that organizations as well as individuals may be granted credentials. This would reflect both current practice with credentials such as OpenBadges, and the realities of what happens when terms are added to schema.org and picked up by its broad community of users. It also reflects the wider potential of the work that we are doing, which may be applicable beyond the education domain.
schema.org
I gave a brief overview of schema.org wanting to emphasize that it is not a precisely defined ontology with many finely distinguished specialist terms, but rather focuses on reuse of loosely constrained terms used a generally as makes sense. It can however be the basis for more specific vocabularies and used with tighter constraints. I also tried to illustrate some opportunities for where we might work within schema.org by illustrating terms (types and properties) that might link to the credentials we describe, and some types that might form the basis of those descriptions:
We had a short discussion about the potential addition of DefinedTerm and related terms to schema.org. There’s a long backstory to that, but it may be something that will help describe competences.
I have been nominated as chair of the group, which I am very happy to be. To my mind this involves a little bit of administration and coordination between the group, W3C and schema.org, and a commitment to try my best to keep the work progressing. I am able to make this commitment because I receive funding from the Credential Engine.
We agreed that we will use the W3C community group tools to carry forward the work. That is we will have discussions on the [email protected] maillist, we will use the wiki to evolve documentation, and we will use this blog to post summaries of our progress and outcomes. All of these channels are open; all members of the group have write access; the world has read access.
A plan of work
We plan to proceed as follows:
Collect outline use cases (to define priorities)
Collect examples from the wild
Deduce requirements from the use cases (check against examples)
Model how to meet these requirements in schema.org
or
Define new schema.org terms
Create example markup
Create code to submit to schema.org
At the end of the work the use cases and requirements plus examples should act as documentation for those who wish to mark-up credentials. We used this same approach for the schema Course extension community group, so take a look there if you would like idea of what it looks like.
The initial work is to collect existing use cases outlines and examples to the wiki and to check that we have some level of agreement about which are priorities. We can then work through the highest priority use cases to create an initial outline of how we would meet them in schema.org, and then fit in what else is necessary.
The timescale is difficult to be sure about, but I would hope that we can do the initial work around use cases and examples before the end of the year, and have something to submit to schema.org by April.
We didn’t schedule a second call. I hope that we can proceed as far as possible using the W3C online tools, and only use conference calls to resolve specific issues when we are stuck.
Bodies that relate to credentials
We finished the call with a discussion around the complexities of what types of entity (organizations) are related to the earning and issuing of credentials. We could say that a credential is awarded by some body (maybe an authority, but not always). From the education point of view, we know that the body that awards the credential may not be the same organization that provides training relevant to that credential. Also, an assessment required for the credential may be provided by third body; and all of these may be subject to accreditation by some other body. Finally, none of that may be the case. There may be wider use cases for which such assumptions do not hold, and gaining a credential is a simple two-party transaction. I am sure we will come back to this. The use cases and examples we gather will guide us through this complexity, and we need to be mindful when describing our outcomes that we do not unnecessarily exclude broader use of our work.
