Add Asserted By to Course

[jeannekitchens]

Currently, courses can only be offered and owned. However, we have two important, real-world use cases where we need to indicated that the course is not owned or offered, rather it is asserted. I'm using asserted as it is in ceterms and it's being used for similar scenarios with occupations and work roles. E.g., the NICE Cybersecurity framework is being published now with Work Roles and Tasks and those are asserted by NIST. They are not offered or owned by NIST. Same is true for the important use cases below.

Use Case 1: We are working with California and will need to be able to publish the California list of courses that have been approved by the California Course Identifier program and given a C-ID designation. They can be seen via this page https://c-id.net/courses and I've downloaded them here. The assertion is by the California Community College System.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b6Sv5qN3glbm33HKggbRSToQLFXIZAl9HG0MkVKsUKQ/edit?usp=sharing

C-ID addresses the need for a “common course numbers” by providing a mechanism to identify comparable courses. Most C-ID numbers identify lower-division transferable courses commonly articulated between the California Community Colleges (CCC) and universities (including Universities of California, the California State Universities, as well as with many of California's independent colleges and universities). While C-ID’s focus is on courses that transfer, some disciplines may opt to develop descriptors for courses that may not transfer to UC or CSU. As submission of a course to C-ID by a CCC indicates acceptance of courses bearing that C-ID number, C-ID is a means of establishing intrasegmental (with the CCC) articulation.

Use Case 2 We are working with NYC Public Schools. The have course descriptions that are developed at the district level. We will be determining if it's even possible to identfy all of the offering schools. At the district level we are going to support publishing these courses. We need to indicate that the courses are assertedBy and as it gets figured out, potentially publish where specifically they're offered. This is one of the pathway course examples. Each pathway has approximately 4 courses direclty in the subject. This example is cybersecurity. There are foundational courses as well. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PivVZvt2tdnMFLZzOkjgILgL9SjW3vr1/view?usp=drive_link that are developed at the district level.

Example 3: Illinois State Board of Education Course Catalog https://www.isbe.net/Pages/Illinois-State-Course-System.aspx and https://www.isbe.net/Documents/state-course-catalog.pdf

[siuc-nate]

It's very important not to confuse asserting information about something vs asserting the thing itself. Those courses are definitely owned and/or offered, or were at some point. Asserting credential registry records about them is a separate notion.

We are working with California and will need to be able to publish the California list of courses that have been approved by the California Course Identifier program

This use case is covered by secondary source publishing. Whoever runs that program can publish data about the courses as a secondary source, put them on their list, etc.

C-ID addresses the need for a “common course numbers” by providing a mechanism to identify comparable courses...

This sounds like just another usage of ceterms:instructionalProgramType, since it does not uniquely identify the courses, but rather makes it easier to group courses together based on their similarity to one another.

We are working with NYC Public Schools. The have course descriptions that are developed at the district level.

Again, this sounds like it's just secondary-source publishing. They want to assert data about something that they do not own.

The only reason we use assertedBy with Occupation is because there genuinely is no owner of the notion of an occupation, thus anything said about any occupation can't really go deeper than being an assertion (and our systems more or less need some CTDL relationship to an organization to function properly) - but on further reflection, even this is probably a bit flawed in terms of linked data, since the idea of "asserting" an occupation doesn't make much sense (and Occupation records in the registry still also bear metadata about who published them anyway).

If anything, we should probably remove assertedBy from Occupation. Or perhaps we should deprecate the assertedBy property entirely, as I'm having trouble thinking of any case that would be a proper usage of it (outside of maybe an Action? But we already have actingAgent for that).

Adding assertedBy here would beg the question of "why not add it to everything?" since the logic also applies to every other class in CTDL, and I think that muddies the waters more than it clarifies them.

We came up with secondary-source publishing to handle, among other things, this case. We should explore that instead, in my opinion.

[philbarker]

I came here to say what Nate said.

Also, if they are not available as linked data, we could consider publishing C-ID as a concept scheme—in this case classification scheme.