Hello Manas, Great work you have done. I want to respond to the part about the minimum components of a syllabus. First, I agree on the need for users, activities and resources. I think those are the right terms. However, I don't think they are enough.
Taking a paving-the-cowpaths and after analyzing 15 organizational communication syllabi each taken from a different universities, it seems that there are evaluation rubrics which are strongly represented. By evaluation rubrics, the vast majority have a grading scale (x = A, y = B), and have what I term grade partitioning (attend = 20%, final = 40%, etc.). Many have activity evaluations embedded in the syllabus (expectations for given activity types), and some have a scoring guide for particular assignments. In addition, if we take an institutional view, syllabi are embedded within a larger context, namely professional communities of practice and their bodies of knowledge. Your work connecting the syllabi to the body of knowledge for computer science provides just such linkage. I suggest the following nested assessment model from the larger point of view. Bodies of knowledge | Programs | | Courses | | | Syllabi | | | | Activities | | | | | Resources | | | | Assessment | | | Assessment | | Assessment | Assessment Assessment Please see some initial markup of assessment rubrics using definition lists and gaining insight from the hReview microformat (which I believe can be usefully deployed to a large degree). http://jeffmcneill.com/microformats/general-writing-assessment-rubric.html http://jeffmcneill.com/microformats/grading-apportionment-rubric.html http://jeffmcneill.com/microformats/grading-scale-rubric.html There are a few different ways that rubrics are represented. The writing assessment rubric (above) is a single measure that we have used at the University of Hawaii for freshmen composition placement. However, there are rubrics which could be multi-criteria-scoring, e.g. that would have each category be a definition term with a definition list of scores and their descriptions. -- Sincerely, Jeff McNeill http://jeffmcneill.com/ On 12/13/07, Manas Tungare <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Jeff and Jeremy, > > > Wondering if there is any work on microformat or markup of a course > > syllabus? Any and all suggestions solicited. > > I'm a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech interested in this effort. We > have been working towards this for some time now (not specifically > microformats, but standard representations for syllabi and courses.) > Our project web site is at http://syllabus.cs.vt.edu/ -- you're > welcome to check it out. > > Right now we're at a phase where we have an extensive collection of > syllabi along with a syllabus editor in development. We hope to be > able to share the fruits of our labor with others by making available > our collection in ways that others can use meaningfully. Microformats > are one of the obvious choices. > > Here's a little bit of background about our work: we have crawled and > analyzed close to 8000 syllabi from the Web, and played with the > collection in many ways: we classified them based on the ACM Computing > Curricula 2001 classification system; we tagged the information from a > few syllabi manually to create a training set for an automatic > extractor, and later put the extractor to use. Some of this work has > been published at SIGCSE 2007, JCDL 2007, ECDL 2007 and AH 2006. > > From our experience with these syllabi, we recently settled on an > ontology that heavily reuses existing standards to represent a > composite syllabus. It includes the most common attributes of syllabi > (but not necessarily all). We're aiming for the concept of a course, > which would be a superset of a syllabus. We believe that syllabi can > be represented with three simple standard entities and relationships > between them: people, resources and activities. Teachers, students, > teaching assistants, textbook authors, etc. are the people involved > and can be marked up as vCard/hCards. Textbooks, assignments, lecture > slides, etc. are resources that can be marked up as Dublin Core. > Lectures, tests, deadlines etc. are obviously events that have an > associated time, and thus represented via hCalendar. (Actually, an > activity = event + resources + people.) > > You can find a lot of examples of syllabi at our site, and I would > gladly add the original URLs to a wiki page if this proposal goes > forward. I would love to hear what this list feels about syllabi: are > they general enough to warrant a microformat of their own? Can they be > represented in another, more general microformat? Our team agrees with > Jeff and Jeremy that the number of unstructured syllabi online, > coupled with the potential for rich applications to be built if a > standard existed, are both strong motivators to move this proposal > forward. > > I have been following the public development of microformats for some > time now, and have marked up my web site with hCard, hCalendar and > hResume wherever appropriate. (http://manas.tungare.name/) I wish we > are soon able to do the same for syllabi. > > -- > Regards, Manas. > _____________________________________________________ > Manas Tungare, http://manas.tungare.name/ > _______________________________________________ > microformats-new mailing list > [email protected] > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new > _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
