Final Report: Curriculum Description


This is the final report for the Curriculum Description activity within the DER Technical Standards for Education project.


Table of Contents


© Copyright 2010 University of Southern Queensland

Introduction

The alignment of learning in schools to set curricula has always been important; the issue is acquiring even more importance currently in Australia through several related developments:

  • The availability of digital learning resources in large quantities, and the desire of teachers to use a variety of resources, rather than a fixed set of curriculum-aligned textbooks as in the past.
  • The need of content publishers to address the learning requirements of multiple markets, each potentially with its own curriculum.
  • The increased mobility of students between jurisdictions with different curricula.

Driven in part by these needs, the Australian Government is establishing a National Curriculum through a consultative process. This curriculum will coexist with jurisdiction curricula for some time, and both kinds of curriculum exist in a digital environment, where lessons are planned and learning resources are discovered online. Curricula need to be embedded in these online processes, if they are to be harnessed effectively.

In the modern digital environment, learning content comes from multiple sources (the web, publishers, jurisdiction content development projects, cultural agencies). Descriptions of this content are often not already aligned to either local or national curricula, and such alignment is essential if the content is to be used effectively. Content providers need to easily describe their curriculum content with multiple local curricula; this is already established practice in content packaging, e.g. IMS Common Cartridge.

Given these factors, curricula have to be available in machine readable format, in order to drive the preparation and assessment of learning as it now takes place. Well-structured machine readable curriculum descriptions can help teachers, parents, students, administrators and employers:

  • discover content based on their local curriculum and the national curriculum
  • facilitate local tailoring of National Curriculum and understand the relationship of the local curriculum to the National Curriculum
  • relate local curriculum to international curricula, to allow greater access to international content
  • chart student progress with respect to a curriculum

This activity is aimed to support school sector uses of machine-readable curriculum descriptions, by establishing standard approaches informed by recommended practice.

The following scenarios present recurrent business processes involving machine-readable curricula, and contextualise how they can be put to use:


Scenario 1: 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.


Scenario 2: Lesson Planning & 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.


Scenario 3: Assessment and Benchmarking

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.


Activity Scope

This activity was intended to support work promoting machine-readable approaches to curriculum, and work on infrastructure supporting machine-readable curriculum. To help achieve the benefits articulated above, this activity provided technical analysis and feedback to the Curriculum Corporation (now ESA) pilot project on making Australian curricula (including the National Curriculum) machine-readable. The pilot project had a clear mandate from the National Curriculum Board (now ACARA) to make machine-readable approaches to the curriculum a reality. The activity was also intended to support demonstrator and pilot applications for curriculum-driven resource discovery, by drawing on recommended practices and standards intelligence described below.

This activity was also intended to gather intelligence from standards bodies, and recommended practice from e-learning practitioners, in machine-readable curricula, their applications, and their use in resource metadata. This will result in more efficient and effective use of machine-readable curricula. Applications include the automated alignment of curricula to each other, alternate learning plans, progress reporting, and content discovery (which critically relies on using curriculum objectives as resource metadata).

The activity was led by Nick Nicholas, with Nigel Ward and Owen ONeill as project team members.


Methodology

  • Identify sector requirements through consultation with key stakeholders and focus group.
  • Analyse standards on curriculum use in content discovery (Common Cartridge, ISO SC36)
  • Analyse current practice on use of machine-readable curricula (ASN)
  • Write progress report, capturing key findings (Deliverable 2)
  • Provide feedback to ongoing projects on current practice, available standards, sector requirements and project scoping. (Contingent on project funding)
  • Provide input and feedback for standards activities discovery (Common Cartridge, ISO SC36), representing Australian requirements and informed by sector consultation
  • Communicate findings on benefits of machine-readable curricula
  • Support projects in demonstrator implementation for curriculum-driven discovery (Contingent on project identification and funding)
  • Write closure report (Deliverable 3)

Challenges


Technical

  • Curriculum objectives will be used in a variety of ways by different systems (assessment, content discovery, learning plans).
  • Lack of familiarity of Australian technologists with approaches taken internationally to machine-readable curricula (Semantic Web)

Non-Technical

  • Curricula are disseminated as text: they have not been used systematically as machine-readable metadata.
  • Alignment between curricula is problematic, particularly in granularity.
  • Unlike other Technical Standards activities, this activity was closely aligned to a separately funded project, and was dependent for progress on that project reaching its goals in a timely manner.

Outcome: Identifying benefits of machine readable curricula

Figure 1: Workflows that can be improved through machine-readable curricula

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.

It may be necessary to classify learning content at a more granular level than the given curriculum outcomes. A suitably flexible approach to machine-readable curricula (such as that considered below) can allow more fine-grained classification, while preserving the relation of the new classifications to the “official” outcomes - so that discovery of content according to the official outcomes is not compromised.


Outcome: Curriculum Corporation Pilot

As noted, this activity was closely aligned to the Curriculum Corporation pilot work on making curricula machine-readable. There are two major approaches to making curricula machine-readable One, which is being used in the UK and the EU, uses XML to code curricula and their alignment to each other and to learning objects. The other, being used in the US, uses the Semantic Web, and relies on relations between persistent identifiers for curriculum outcomes and capabilities. As we have argued elsewhere (see Communications), a Semantic Web approach has significant advantages in extensibility, lightweight use in classification, and straightforward alignment with other online processes.

The Curriculum Corporation pilot pursued the second approach, and was done in partnership with JES & Co. JES & Co. manage the Achievement Standards Network (ASN) in the US; this is a publicly funded resource which has disaggregated the curricula of all fifty states into hierarchical structures with persistent identifiers, and which provides Semantic Web infrastructure services for exploiting the resulting structures. JES & Co are well-established as a presence in machine-readable curricula; they have recently partnered with SF Association US, for example, to make their coded curricula accessible to the newly developed Instructional Services module of SIF.

The major work done on the pilot was between August 2009 and December 2009. The work involved localizing the ASN data model to the Australian curriculum context, and deploying RDF tools (editors) to enable Curriculum Corporation to work on the machine-readable curricula locally, including mapping between curricula and tagging objects. The activity team participated in discussions during the process, including reviewing the proposed mapping and the editor, and helping flesh out some of the requirements.

The further demonstrator applications envisioned by the activity did not eventuate, because of the uncertainty around ESA, the need to solicit engagement from ACARA, and the lateness in the availability of an explicit National Curriculum structure. A pilot project mapping between the National Curriculum and a jurisdiction’s curriculum is planned for the second half of 2010, and there is ongoing work on mapping the ESA learning resource subject thesaurus, ScOT, to curriculum structures, in order to classify learning resources already described through ScOT. That work however is outside the timeframe of this activity.


Outcome: Intelligence on machine-readable curricula

The activity team has had extensive discussions with the JES & Co staff involved in ASN (Diny Golder, Stuart Sutton, Jon Phipps) about the framework they are using, its potential, and the problems it is being used to solve in US education. The activity team have compared the ASN approach to the XML-based approach taken in the UK and EU, and have documented the benefits of a Semantic Web-based approach to curricula.

The activity team attended an IMS quarterly meeting (Montreal, July 2009); this featured a full-day workshop on Curriculum Standards attended by publishers and educationalists. The workshop discussed sector requirements for machine-readable curricula, extending beyond lesson planning to resource discovery, e-portfolios, and assessment. The workshop also established how machine-readable curricula can be used to classify learning content under the IMS Common Cartridge standard for learning object distribution. IMS is committed to incorporating curriculum outcome coding consistent with ASN in Common Cartridge.


Outcome: Communications

Unlike other activities, this activity did not end up convening a focus group to elicit requirements and explore ways forward with. The activity was set out to support existing projects, in particular the Curriculum Corporation pilot, which had NCB/ACARA as its client: it would not have been appropriate for the activity to explore alternative options outside the existing framework, and set up consultations in opposition to ACARA. The sensitivity around publicising ongoing pilot work meant it was not feasible to solicit requirements widely, although as discussed below the activity played an important role in raising awareness.

It was intended at the start of 2010 to convene a focus group for the activity, as part of the Curriculum Corporation pilot, with representation from the CIOs of the jurisdictions in Australia. The disruption brought about by the merger of Curriculum Corporation with Education.au, and the demands it has made on ESA staff, have prevented this from happening within the timeframe of the activity.

In the absence of a formal focus group, the activity did not have a ready outlet to exchange insights with the sector at large about what can be made possible through machine-readable curricula. However it became clear in discussion with Curriculum Corporation and with practitioners in the sector that the Semantic Web approaches espoused by ASN were unfamiliar, and the benefits of the approaches needed to be articulated for an Australian audience.

For these reasons, the activity took on raising awareness of these benefits as a major component of its work.

  • The activity team was asked by ESA to prepare a benefit statement of the approach, which could be taken to ACARA to motivate further work. This benefit statement has been published online. The benefit statement has been used by JES & Co to argue for their approach in other jurisdictions (UK), and has been used as a basis for a proof of concept implementation by Wilbert Kraan of CETIS, harnessing the curriculum to e-portfolios
  • Three blog articles published on the Link Affiliates blog describe the potential benefits of the approach, the outcomes of the IMS Montreal workshop on curriculum description, and the work to date on piloting machine-readable curricula by ESA with ASN, including the benefit statement
  • The activity team presented the curriculum work to sector practitioners in appropriate fora, including the face-to-face meeting of all Technical Standards focus groups (March 9), and the Learning Content Discovery and Exchange focus group (December 11). There was much excitement from focus group participants about the possibilities of the approach, and its connections to other activities such as e-portfolios and lesson plans. The excitement was not limited to the school sector: VET sector representatives were also keen to hear more about the pilot progress, and proposed ways they could make use of the approach.

Conclusion

The work on machine-readable curricula has come at an opportune time, with a convergence of several factors driving it: the growing practical use of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies outside the lab; the continuing movement towards online resource dissemination and discovery across jurisdiction boundaries; the takeup of standards supporting such dissemination and discovery (IMS Common Cartridge, SIF Instructional Services, ISO SC36 Competencies); the emergence of other contexts for using curricula and assessment (including e-portfolios); student mobility and the need to map between lesson plans and assessment. Not least, the work on machine-readable curricula capitalises on the drive in Australia towards a National Curriculum - itself a result of several of these factors: the need to map between existing state curricula and the new curriculum is particularly suited to machine-readable approaches.

The activity has attracted considerable excitement both nationally and internationally. Despite the disruptions to the pilot project which this activity has supported, the following stages of the pilot are eagerly awaited, and will be put to good use by the sector. In doing so, the sector can draw on the considerable infrastructure and experience already in place in the US school sector, which has been able to make use of machine-readable curricula despite the absence of a national curriculum. (In fact that absence has driven the innovative approach of ASN towards coding curricula.)


Appendix: Relevant Approaches and Specifications


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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