Briefing Paper: Curriculum Description

This paper provides context for the Curriculum Description activity within the Technical Standards for Digital Education project.

The aim is to provide background and provide a framework for eliciting feedback from the focus group on business requirements, possible technical approaches, and priorities for engagement with standards and specifications bodies.

This document is a work in progress: it will be expanded in collaboration with the focus group for this activity.


© Copyright 2009 University of Southern Queensland

Business drivers

  1. The National Curriculum will establish a uniform set of learning objectives nationally by mid 2010.
  2. Content providers want their content to align to curricula efficiently.
  3. Teachers want to discover content to aligns with curriculum.
  4. Students and parents want to measure student progress against curricula.
  5. State and school-based variation in curricula will likely persist, and both national and local curricula need to be integrated to address the other drivers.

Interoperability challenges

  • Curricula are disseminated as text: they have not been used systematically as machine readable metadata.
  • Alignment between curricula is problematic, particularly in granularity.
  • Curriculum objectives will be used in a variety of ways by different systems (assessment, content discovery, learning plans).

Scenario

Machine readable curricula help plan courses satisfying curriculum objectives - especially finding course content to match curriculum content. They are also help in assessing student progress against curriculum objectives, as these have been realised in various jurisdictions. The following scenarios present recurrent business processes involving machine readable curricula:

  • aligning learning content to the machine readable curriculum;
  • discovering learning content through the machine readable curriculum (once they have been aligned), and using it to plan lessons satisfying curriculum objectives;
  • comparing student progress across different states, using the National Curriculum as a common benchmark.

Content Classification

Learnamax Pty Ltd creates a learning object on the rings of Saturn. Curriculum Inc. confirms that Learnamax’s learning object can be used in Australian schools. Curriculum Inc. uses the single National Curriculum (NC) to indicate in the learning object’s metadata how it contributes to learning outcomes. By using the single NC instead of the curricula of the different states and territories, Curriculum Inc. does its work more efficiently: it does not have to look up objectives in eight different curricula. Curriculum Inc. tags Learnamax’s learning object with the NC objective “solar system”.

Learnamax’s learning object is distributed to various jurisdiction portals. Victoria’s curriculum is aligned with the NC. The Victorian jurisdiction portal maps the NC objective for the learning object (“solar system”) to the Victorian Curriculum objective (“astronomy”). The Victorian jurisdiction portal stores the Learnamax learning object, which can be searched through either the national or the Victorian set of objectives.

Learning Paths & Content Discovery

Hiram is a science teacher in Swan Hill Primary, preparing an astronomy course for Year 5. Hiram’s course needs to satisfy the Year 5–6 Victorian science curriculum objectives. Hiram’s course also needs to draw on “matrices” of competencies, that students should develop across a range of concerns, including social and cultural skills.

Hiram seeks guidance on what sequence to present the Victorian curriculum objectives in his course. He gets that guidance from various sources, including the NSW model syllabus, and suggestions from the CSIRO Science for Schools programme. Both those sources use the National Curriculum objectives as a common reference point

Hiram searches the Victorian jurisdiction portal for digital curriculum content which matches the Victorian Science curriculum outcomes on astronomy. Hiram gets lots of hits, including the Learnamax learning object on the rings of Saturn. Hiram selects course material from the Victorian portal, without needing to know which content provider they have been sourced from, and without having to do a series of different searches for different sources of content: the single NC-based search retrieves everything relevant.

Hiram incorporates the Learnamax material in his lesson plan. He uses the Learnamax learning object in the classroom, and the students are enthralled.

Assessment

The Swan Hill LMS records that Hiram’s students have successfully completed the Rings of Saturn module. The LMS records that Hiram’s students have met the Victorian curriculum outcome on Astronomy, and the NC outcome on the Solar System.

Hiram’s student Karen is moving to Broken Hill. Karen’s parents want a report on Karen’s progress before she leaves: Broken Hill Primary can use this report to determine whether she needs to take make-up classes once she arrives, to satisfy NSW requirements. The Swan Hill Primary report indicates the NC objectives that Karen has met, including “solar system”. Broken Hill Primary can map those NC objectives against its own curriculum, and use that to find out if there are any Broken Hill Primary subjects that Karen has not already done the equivalent of.

Interoperability and technical analysis

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Workflows that can be improved through machine-readable curricula

The national curriculum, as well as the state and school curricula which will continue to exist, consist of a hierarchy of expected Outcomes, organised by convention into Key Learning Areas, Levels, and Strands; the hierarchy has been agreed on nationally, even though the different Outcomes vary.

The national curriculum provides an opportunity for infrastructure to support innovative and efficient approaches to the business of teaching and learning. The infrastructure can use machine readable representations of the curricula to do two major tasks: Align curriculum outcomes with each other, and Classify learning content through curriculum outcomes.

Aligning curriculum outcomes

Aligning curriculum outcomes means determining whether two outcomes from different curricula are the same. If two outcomes are not, it can provide ways of expressing the relation between them, including dealing with the different granularity of outcomes. Outcomes are treated as machine-readable assertions of competency, related to each other in several ways.

Alignment can help with gap analysis of the national curriculum, as it is reviewed. The alignment also makes it possible to compare assessment across different states: this can help determine the progress to date of a student moving interstate, and what outcomes they need to catch up on. It will also help translate school-based assessment to reporting competencies, in terms used outside the school sector (e.g. by employers).

For teachers designing lessons and syllabi, curriculum outcomes can be arranged in alternate structures. This already occurs in state curricula with the “matrices” of different outcome sets satisfying different requirements, and with professional organizations identifying different priorities and goals for education. Once the outcomes and relations between them follow a machine readable standard, teachers can navigate the curriculum, working out the most appropriate learning paths for their purposes. Based on this exploration, they can draw up learning plans for students, covering a particular sequence among the outcomes to be covered throughout the level.

Classifying learning content

Classifying learning objects according to curriculum outcomes allows teachers to discover content satisfying those outcomes. Using outcomes as machine-readable metadata helps teachers do targeted searches for content to add to a specific learning plan (which will be based on the same machine-readable outcomes). Using a single set of outcomes, drawn from the national curriculum, allows content providers to classify learning content efficiently. Because outcomes are aligned between state curricula and the national curriculum, state-specific (machine-readable) outcomes can still be used to discover content classified according to the national curriculum.

Relevant approaches and specifications

Curricula

Outcomes

  • Persistent Identifiers for discrete outcomes, allowing them to be differentiated and named in machine readable contexts. (see e.g. http://linkaffiliates.net.au/pilin2/ )
  • Machine-readable assertions as representations of outcomes
  • (These approaches have already explored extensively in the US, where curriculum alignment is a critical enabler. See e.g. http://www.jesandco.org/ http://www.achievementstandards.org/ http://www.thegateway.org/ )
  • Semantic Web http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ : a framework of enriching the World Wide Web with representations of meaning, to enable more intelligent discovery and reuse of data.
  • RDF http://www.w3.org/RDF/ . RDF is the dominant mechanism for expressing conceptual relations between arbitrary resources (which can include outcomes). It can be used as a basis for automated inferencing and queries, and is the main engine behind the Semantic Web.

Alignment

  • Natural Language processing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing : procedures for extracting information from textual descriptions through understanding of human language constructions. Can be used to extract outcome alignments and dependencies automatically from curriculum descriptions.
  • Data mining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining : general procedures for extracting patterns and information from large collections of data. Can also be used to extract information needed for alignment from curriculum descriptions.

Alternate Structures/Relations

  • RDF
  • Existing competency vocabularies e.g. http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg20/ : these provide established vocabularies for enumerating the skills students are expected to develop, and can be used to organise outcomes thematically.

Content Discovery


The Technical Standards for Digital Education project is funded by the Australian Government's Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR).

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