Wikidata talk:Requests for comment/How to model curricula and link them to educational resources?

Step 1: Modelling curricula on Wikidata the Education Team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring the idea of using Wikidata for the following use-cases: 1. For education stakeholders to do comparative analysis of curricula on a global scale. This will help policy makers to identify gaps, and would contribute to the achievement of SDG4. It would also help promote and increase Wikidata literacy among the global education sector. 2. to curate content on Wikimedia projects that is aligned with school curricula, so that teachers can easily find and make use of relevant content. If we wanted to, for example, create content packages of Wikimedia articles, documents, books, images, etc that are aligned with school curricula for teachers to make use of, there is no easy or straightforward way to do this. 3. To work with the community to improve the content related to school curricula. In our current work, we found that much of the content on Wikipedia related to school curricula, especially in languages other than English, is C class or lower. Moreover, other aspects of the content are way too convoluted for the age group that is studying the concept to make use of the content. For example, in the national curriculum of Ghana, 11 year old students with 7 years of prior schooling are required to learn about positional notation positional notation (Q1747853). The English article for positional notation is a C class, and it's reading level according to the SMOG scale is 12.66. This means that the people who are most likely going to need the content of that article would not be able to read it. Being able to create lists of content aligned with school curricula, understand their quality, and analyze their application to the schooling level would help us to enable teachers and students worldwide to have access to the information they are required to teach and learn in the languages they speak. NSaad (WMF) (talk) 11:56, 17 April 2020 (UTC) @NSaad (WMF): Good points. What's your point of view about the comparative granularity (Wikipedia - Wikidata - curricula - educational resources)? The nice thing about the UK one that was mentioned is that it's fairly readable even to non-specilist (at least the parts I read). I guess many people that usually don't read curricula ended up doing so last month. --- Jura 12:12, 17 April 2020 (UTC) @Jura1:That's one of the challenges, if I'm understanding right what you mean by granularity. Fields of study aren't standardized on a global level apart from the ICSE, which is relatively broad in terms of concept descriptions. I'm currently reaching out to the IBE to see what their thoughts are. NSaad (WMF) (talk) 09:11, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Step 2: Linking to relevant educational resources Comments here Existing examples / resources The National Science Digital Library (US K-12) The Australian Curriculum did some work on this using a Thesaurus to tag the Curriculum and resources. There is an overview of the concept from Ward & Nicholas 2010. Perhaps the UNESCO thesaurus is a candidate for such a project globally. Chapmann & Sutton modelled learning resources by competency level in some detail ASN project

Step 3: Importing the data into Wikidata systematically Comments here

Step 4: Providing ways for people to find and access the information Reciprocal links I believe it is important to not only link curricula to resources, but also the other way around. That way, if you come across one resource, you can easily see which curricula it aims to help towards. It will also make it easier to "traverse up" to find related resources from the curricula. Practically, it will also be a very nice feature for future infoboxes on Wikiversity and Wikibooks. Ainali (talk) 09:50, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

General discussion Comments here

Main questions Use cases Which additional use cases are there within and external to Wikimedia projects? Which audiences could this data be useful to? Inclusiveness How to include educational material providers in discussions about contribution and reuse? How to make this a usable and useful resource for the people with the knowledge on resources available, e.g teachers How to make it useful for content producers to map their work to e.g Khan Academy Structural issues in Wikidata How to encourage consistent modelling of data to make it more usable? e.g clear schemas and Wikidata:Tours

Australian Educational Vocabulary: Schools Online Thesaurus

Hi all. I thought I'd chip in with something related that is already in process. Schools Online Thesaurus (Q65000093) (ScOT) is a controlled vocabulary of educational terms used in Australian and New Zealand School curricula. The terms are arranged hierarchically, with some language translations and linked interrelations. These terms are then used to tag the Australian curriculum and various catalogue information services, which allow teachers access to educational resources related to these terms. I'm not a teacher, so don't quite understand the behind the scenes usage (not always open data) of these terms. However, I did notice that Wikidata does a better job of language translation and interrelation linking, so it is useful to make a mapping between their terms and our items. There is already a property at Australian Educational Vocabulary ID (P7033), and a Mix'n'match catalog 2708. Linking is laborious work because the terms can be about any type of concept. But I've put in many hours on the train, and we have about 65% of the terms mapped already. I would very much appreciate anyone else helping out with the matching. Once complete, I forsee some nice visualisations of what the curriculum looks like as a mind map, but also tools to allow navigation around related terms and to relevant curriculum resources. So please do help match. I'd appreciate comments or questions on how it might be more valuable. And if it is a useful model for other curricula, then do feel free to follow this path. h/t User:Pru.mitchell for alerting me to this discussion. --99of9 (talk) 01:28, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

For example, here is a query showing a snippet of the Wikidata enhanced mindmap of terms in ScOT centred around chemical element (Q11344). --99of9 (talk) 01:33, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Thank you very much @99of9:, --John Cummings (talk) 09:33, 12 May 2020 (UTC)