Education Services Australia

Paradata StandardNick Nicholas

Education Services Australia• Standards critical to what we do• Interoperability & Specification• Education Vocabularies Australia (RDF, SKOS)• Schools Online Thesaurus (RDF, SKOS)• Machine Readable Australian Curriculum (RDF,

DC, ASN)• ANZ LOM for NDLRN resources (LOM)• Identity Projects (OpenId, SAML, SIF)• Improve (IMS QTI)• Paradata (LR Paradata)

Paradata• Usage analytics of digital

learning resources• Quantitative metrics• How often was this resource downloaded?

• Paedagogic context, inferred through user actions• Where was this resource taught?• How was this resource aligned with the

curriculum?• What kinds of teachers used the resource?

• Cf. Metadata, provided by experts

Paradata• Usage analytics of digital

learning resources• Individual or Aggregated• A teacher from Victoria used this resource in a

Year 3 Geography class last Tuesday• 347 users accessed this resource last month

Why?• Improved search ranking• Communities of practice• Feedback to publishers• Feedback to jurisdictions• Discovery across portals• Discovery outside portals

History• Initially defined 2010• National Science Digital Library, XSD• Learning Registry, 2011• Several US participants, UK, EU• Moving towards LRMI (Schema.org)

• ADL, 2012 (TinCan)• Specifications based on ActivityStreams• Same overall structure, differ in some

attributes and level of strictness

Web 2.0 Standard• Represented in JSON• Lightweight (to deploy & to consume)• Open-ended• No managed vocabularies• Key-value pairs• A few fixed structural keys• Statements: predicates• actor, verb, object (the resource), context• “(John) (liked) (War and Peace) (on

Facebook)”

Example“Seven Victorian English teachers aligned learning resource R7878 to Australian Curriculum content description ACELA1326”

•Activity•Verb: •Action: aligned•Measure:

•MeasureType: count•Value: 7

•Actor:•Description: VIC, English•objectType: teacher

•Object:•ID: R7878•objectType: Learning resource

•Related:•ID: ACELA1326•objectType: academic standard

Web 2.0 (loose) standard• Yes, Risk of splintering• Of vocabularies• Of structure• Of management

• But: Easy adoption• Easy to implement• Easy to customise• Harness existing infrastructure• Which are standards

Links• Learning Registry:

• http://www.learningregistry.org/documents• http://www.commoncorelabs.com/

• TinCan:• http://www.adlnet.gov/capabilities/tla/experi

ence-api• ActivityStreams:

• http://activitystrea.ms/ • Australian Paradata Blog

• http://australianparadata.wordpress.com