Sarah, thanks for your response.
Here a little bit more about 5.6 and 5.7:
> I'm not sure I agree with you here! We had a long and fairly
> contentious discussion about this a while back on the CETIS Metadata &
> Digital Repositories SIG discussion list- I'll try to find it. I tend
> to come down on the side of "age is not useful for representing
> educational level": you can have gifted students at age 10 studying 1st
> year university-level materials, you can have adults learning to read
> for the first time, in fact, age has very little to do with what level a
> university resource is pitched at: 1st year engineering could have
> students of any age from 15 to 75 studying there. Adults in their
> thirties can return to college or secondary school to get basic
> qualifications, the examples go on and on. Trying to represent
> educational levels as age ranges is problematic on a number of levels.
You're right, I forgot to mention that I was referring to the "school"
context. From pre-school to secondary education, it is my opinion that we
must somehow map educational resources according to the state of
intellectual development. I would certainly not use Piaget's nomenclature
here but referring to age range might help. Teachers expect to be able to
select resources according to the grade levels in their jurisdiction.
Trouble is, in a shared environment (we work on a project with France,
Switzerland, Belgium and Quebec) we end up with a mix of references to
colleges, lyceums, gymnasium, athena. In France, secondary school year are
counted backward from 5 to 1, etc. While I'm convinced that the interface
should stick with grade levels, I wondering about a way to provide
interoperability, for example displaying grades but automatically recording
minimum and maximum age. This also brings the issue of including
implementation strategies in the standard: data model, UML, Schematron and
the like. Would we be going to far?
About the other contexts, I agree that there is little value in linking age
to on site training, adult education, lifelong learning and alphabetization.
In MLR, we added "vocational" to context values but it's not clear to me now
if there is a difference between vocational education and on-site training?
Should we rely on 9 classification and consider using some competencies
mappings (SC36 WG3 has started some work on competency model)? Then, only
trained specialists would be able to fill records...
--
Pierre-Julien Guay
Vitrine Technologie-Éducation
http://ntic.org/
(514) 332-3000, poste 6026
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