Some personal reflections on relating educational content to curriculum frameworks prompted by some conversation about the Oak National Academy (a broad curriculum of online material available to schools, based on the English national curriculum), and OEH-Linked-Frameworks (an RDF tool for visualizing German educational frameworks). It draws heavily on the BBC curriculum ontology (by Zoe Rose, I think). I’m thinking about these with respect to work I have been involved in such as K12-OCX and LRMI.

If you want to know why you would do this, you might want to skip ahead and read the “so what?” section first. But in brief: representing curriculum frameworks in a standard, machine-readable way, and mapping curriculum materials to that, would help when sharing learning resources.

Curriculum?

But first: curriculum. What does it mean to say  “a broad curriculum of online material available to schools, based on the English national curriculum”? The word curriculum is used in several different ways (there are 71 definitions in the IGI Global dictionary). ranging from “the comprehensive multitude of learning experiences provided by school to its students” (source) to “the set of standards, objectives, and concepts required to be taught and learned in a given course or school year” (source).  So curriculum in one sense is the teaching, in the other all that should be learnt. Those are different: the Oak National Academy provides teaching materials and activities (for learning experiences); the English National Curriculum specifies what should be learnt. Because very few people are interested in one but not the other, these two meanings often get conflated, which is normally fine but here I want to treat them separately and show how they relate to each other. Lets call them Curriculum Content and Materials, and Curriulum Frameworks respectively, think about how to represent the framework, and then how to relate to content and materials to that framework.

Curriculum Frameworks

This is where the BBC curriculum ontology comes in. It has a nice three-dimensional structure, creating the framework on the axes of Field of Study, Level and Topic.

The levels are those that are defined by the national curriculum for progression English schools (KS = Key Stage, children aged 5 to 7 are normally at Key Stage 1; GCSE is the exam typically taken at 16, so represents the end of compulsory education, though students may stay on to study A-levels or similar after that). The levels used in curriculum frameworks tend to be very contextual, normally relating to the grade levels and examinations used in the school system for which the framework is written. It may be useful to relate them to more neutral (or at least, less heavily contextualised) schemes such as the levels of the EQF, or the levels of the Connecting Credentials framework.

The field of study may be called the “educational subject” (though I don’t like to writing RDF statements with Subject as the object) or, especialy in HE, “discipline”. Topics are the subjects studied within a field or discipline. I don’t much like the examples given here because the topics do just look like mini fields of study. I would wonder where to put “biology”–is it a topic within science or a field of study in its own right. A couple of points about field of study and one about topic may help clarify. In higher education a field of study if often called a discipline, which highlights that it is not just the thing being studied, but a community with a common interest and agreed norms on the tools and techniques used to study the subject. Most HE disciplines have an adjectival form that relates to people (I am a Physicists, she is a Humanist). In schools, fields of study are sometimes artifacts of the curriculum design process with no real equilavent outside of school. These artifacts often seem to have names that are initialisms that you won’t come across outside of specific school settings, for example RMPS ( Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies), PE (Physical Education), PSHE (personal, social, health and economic education), ESL (English as a Second Language) / ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), ICT (Information and Computer Techonolgy) DT (Design and Technology) — but very often the fields of study will have the same names as the top levels of a topic taxonomy (math/s, english, science). Most fields of study will have someone in a school who is a teacher of that field or leader of its teaching for the school. Topics are more neutral of context, less personal, more like the subjects of the Dewey Decimal System (at least more like they are supposed to be). It’s important to note that the same topic may be covered in different fields of study / disciplines in different ways. For example statistics may be a discipline itself (part of maths), with a very theoretical approach taken to studying the topics, but those topics may also be studied in biology, physics and economics. Crucially when it comes to facilitating discovery of suitable content materials for the curriculum, the approach taken and examples used will probably mean a resource aimed at teaching a statistics topic for economics is not very useful for teaching the same topic as part of physics or mathematics.

On to these axes get mapped the what are variously called learning objectives, intended learning outcomes, learning standards, and so on: the competences you want the students to acheive. They exist in the framework as statements of what  knowledge, skills, abilities a student is expected to be able to demonstrate. Let’s call them competences because that is a term that has wides currency beyond education, for example a competence can link educational outcomes to job requirements. There is a lot written about competences. There’s lots about how to write competence statements, including the form the descriptions should take (“you will be able to …”; how to form them as objectives (specific, mearsurable, …); how they relate to context (“able to … under supervision”); how they relate to each other (“you must learn to walk before you learn to run”); what tools should be used (“able to use a calculator to …”). And, of course, there are the specifications, standards and RDF vocabularies for representing all these aspects of competences, e.g. ASN, IMS CASE, ESCO. Let’s not go into that except to say that a curriculum framework will describe these competences as learning objectives and map them to the Field of study, topic and level schemes used by the framework. The same terms described below for mapping content to frameworks can be useful in doing this.

Mapping Curriculum Content to Curriculum Frameworks

So we have some curriculum content material; how do we map it to the curriculum framework?

It may help to model the content material in the way K12-OCX did, following oerschema, as a hierarchy of course, module, unit, lesson, activity, with associated materials and assessments:

(Aside: any given course may not have modules or units, or either.)

Breaking curriculum materials down from monolithic courses to their constituent parts (while keeping the logical and pedagogical relationships between those parts) creates finer grained resources more easily accomodated into existing contexts.

At the Course level, oerschema.org gives us the property syllabus which can be used to relate the course to the framework as a whole, called by oerschema a CourseSyllabus, (“syllabus” is another word used in various ways, so lets not worry about any difference between a syllabus and a curriculum framework). This may also be useful at finer-grained levels, e.g. Module and Unit.

@prefix oer: <http://oerschema.org/> .
@prefix sdo: <http://schema.org/> .
@base <http://example.org/> .
<myCurriculumFramework> a oer:CourseSyllabus .
<myCourse> a oer:Course, sdo:Course ;
    oer:syllabus <myCurriculumFramework> .

[example code in tutle, there’s a JSON-LD version of it all below]

We can use the schema.org educationalLevel property to relate the resource to the educational level of the framework:

<myCourse> sdo:educationalLevel <myCurriculumFramework/Levels/KS4> .

Lets say our course deals with Mathematics and has a Unit on Statistics (no modules). We can use the schema.org AlignmentObject to say that there is an educationAlignment between my Course and my Unit to the field of study (that is, in the language of the alignment object, the educational subject). We can use the schema.org about property to say what the topic is:

<myCourse> sdo:hasPart <myUnit> ;
    sdo:educationalAlignment [
        a sdo:AlignmentObject ;
        sdo:alignmentType "educationalSubject";
        sdo:targetUrl <myCurriculumFramework/FieldsOfStudy/Mathematics>
    ] .

<myUnit> a oer:Unit, sdo:LearningResource ;
    sdo:educationalAlignment [
        a sdo:AlignmentObject ;
        sdo:alignmentType "educationalSubject";
        sdo:targetUrl <myCurriculumFramework/FieldsOfStudy/Mathematics>
    ] ;
    sdo:about <myCurriculumFramework/Topic/Statistics> .

For lessons, and especially for activities, we can relate to competences as individual learning objectives. The schema.org teaches property is designed for this:

<myUnit> sdo:hasPart <myLesson> .
<myLesson> a oer:Lesson, sdo:LearningResource ;
    sdo:hasPart <myActivity> .

<myActivity> a oer:Activity, sdo:LearningResource ;
   sdo:teaches <myCurriculumFramework/Objective/Competence0123> .

Whether you repeat about and educationalAlignment statements linking to “Field of Study” and “Topic” in the descriptions of Lessons and Activities depends on how much you want to rely on inferencing that something which is a part of a course has the same Fields of Study, something which is a part of Unit has the same topic, and so on. If your parts might get scattered, or used by systems that don’t do RDF inferencing, then you’ll want to repeat them (they will, you should). I haven’t done so here just to avoid repetition.

Finally, let’s link the competence statement to the framework (the framework here represented in a fairly crude way, not wanting to get into the intricacies of competence frameworks):

<myCurriculumFramework> a oer:CourseSyllabus, sdo:DefinedTermSet ;
    sdo:hasDefinedTerm <myCurriculumFramework/Objective/Competence0123> .

<myCurriculumFramework/Objective/Competence0123> a sdo:DefinedTerm,  
                                                   sdo:LearningResource ;
    sdo:educationalAlignment [ 
        a sdo:AlignmentObject ; 
        sdo:alignmentType "educationalSubject"; 
        sdo:targetUrl <myCurriculumFramework/FieldsOfStudy/Mathematics> 
    ] ;
    sdo:about <myCurriculumFramework/Topic/Statistics> ;
    sdo:educationalLevel <myCurriculumFramework/Levels/KS4> ;
    sdo:description "You will be able to use a calculator to find the mean..." ;
    sdo:name "Calculate the arithmetic mean" .

(Aside: Modelling a learning objective / competence as a defined term and a LearningResource is probably the most  controversial thing here, but I think it works for illustration.)

So What?

Well this shows several things I think would be useful:

• Having metadata for a curriculum (whatever it is) will help others find it and use it, if suitable tools for using the metadata exist.
• Tools are more likely to exist if the metadata is nicely machine readable (RDF, not PDF) and standardised (widely used vocabularies like schema.org).
• A common model for curriculum frameworks will make mapping from one to another easier. For example. it’s easier to map from UK to US educational levels if they are clearly and separately defined.
• Breaking curriculum materials down from monolithic courses to their constituent parts (while keeping the logical and pedagogical relationships between those parts) creates finer grained resources more easily accomodated into existing contexts.
• Mapping curriculum materials to learning objectives in a given framework makes it easier to find resources for that curriculum, which is great, but the world is bigger than one curriculum.
• Mapping both learning objectives and curriculum materials to the axes of the curriculum framework model makes it easier to find resources appropriate accross different curricula.

Finally, if you prefer your RDF as JSON-LD:

{
  "@context": {
    "oer": "http://oerschema.org/",
    "rdf": "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#",
    "rdfs": "http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#",
    "schema": "http://schema.org/",
    "sdo": "http://schema.org/",
    "xsd": "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"
  },
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework",
      "@type": [
        "oer:CourseSyllabus",
        "schema:DefinedTermSet"
      ],
      "schema:hasDefinedTerm": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/Objective/Competence0123"
      }
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://example.org/myActivity",
      "@type": [
        "oer:Activity",
        "schema:LearningResource"
      ],
      "schema:teaches": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/Objective/Competence0123"
      }
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://example.org/myCourse",
      "@type": [
        "schema:Course",
        "oer:Course"
      ],
      "oer:syllabus": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework"
      },
      "schema:educationalAlignment": {
        "@id": "_:ub132bL12C30"
      },
      "schema:educationalLevel": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/Levels/KS4"
      },
      "schema:hasPart": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myUnit"
      }
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://example.org/myLesson",
      "@type": [
        "schema:LearningResource",
        "oer:Lesson"
      ],
      "schema:hasPart": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myActivity"
      }
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://example.org/myUnit",
      "@type": [ 
        "oer:Unit",
        "schema:LearningResource"
       ],
       "schema:about": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/Topic/Statistics"
      },
      "schema:educationalAlignment": {
        "@id": "_:ub132bL21C30"
      },
      "schema:hasPart": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myLesson"
      }
    },
    {
      "@id": "_:ub132bL12C30",
      "@type": "schema:AlignmentObject",
      "schema:alignmentType": "educationalSubject",
      "schema:targetUrl": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/FieldsOfStudy/Mathematics"
      }
    },
    {
      "@id": "_:ub132bL40C30",
      "@type": "schema:AlignmentObject",
      "schema:alignmentType": "educationalSubject",
      "schema:targetUrl": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/FieldsOfStudy/Mathematics"
      }
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/Objective/Competence0123",
      "@type": [
        "schema:LearningResource",
        "schema:DefinedTerm"
      ],
      "schema:about": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/Topic/Statistics"
      },
      "schema:description": "You will be able to use a calculator to find the mean ...",
      "schema:educationalAlignment": {
        "@id": "_:ub132bL40C30"
      },
      "schema:educationalLevel": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/Levels/KS4"
      },
      "schema:name": "Calculate the arithmetic mean"
    },
    {
      "@id": "_:ub132bL21C30",
      "@type": "schema:AlignmentObject",
      "schema:alignmentType": "educationalSubject",
      "schema:targetUrl": {
        "@id": "http://example.org/myCurriculumFramework/FieldsOfStudy/Mathematics"
      }
    }
  ]
}

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