LRMI, Open badges and alignment objects — Sharing and learning Phil Barker's work

I had the pleasure yesterday to talk on the Mozilla Open Badges community call about how LRMI and Open Badges may intersect. Open Badges are a means of displaying digital recognition of skills and achievements, there’s a technical framework behind the badges that offers the means of providing data in support of the claimed achievement. A particular part of this technical framework is the assertion specification, which includes a pointer from each badge to “the educational standards this badge aligns to, if any”. This parallels the LRMI alignment object very closely: in short the educationalAlignment property that LMRI added to schema.org allows encoding of statements along the lines of “this resource [teaches|assess|requires|has level] X” where X is some point in an shared educational framework, e.g. of attainment standards, topics or educational levels or shared curriculum. Diagrammatically

The creative work aligns with a node in an educational framework. The alignment object identifies that node and the nature of the alignment.

The Mozilla badge alignment object is described thus:

Property	Expected Type	Description
name	Text	Name of the alignment.
url	URL	URL linking to the official description of the standard.
description	Text	Short description of the standard

and an example is provided

{
  "name": "Awesome Robotics Badge",
...
  "alignment": [
    { "name": "CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RST.11-12.3", 
      "url": "http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RST/11-12/3", 
      "description": "Follow precisely a complex multistep procedure when carrying out experiments, taking measurements, or performing technical tasks; analyze the specific results based on explanations in the text."
    }]
...
}

Diagrammatically:

The badge information includes an assertion that the skill or achievement aligns with some point in an educational standard

Not only do the LRMI and Open Badge alignment objects both do the same thing they seem to have have the following semantically equivalent properties relating to identifying the thing that is aligned to:

OpenBadge alignment object URL == LRMI alignment object targetURL
OpenBadge alignment object name == LRMI alignment object targetName
OpenBadge alignment object description == LRMI alignment object targetDescription

(I like to think that this is not coincidence, but I don’t know how the similarity arose.)

The differences:

Open Badges do not identify the type of alignment. It has no need, I guess, since the alignment is always one of “asserts ability at” or something similar. LRMI currently recommends no relevant value.
Open Badges do not name the framework, I guess the assume that identifying the node will lead to knowledge of the framework. LRMI felt that this would not always be enough.
The LRMI alignment object can be used in conjunction with a property of schema.org/CreativeWorks, I don’t think Mozilla open badge assertions are creative works in that sense, I think they are some type of schema.org/Intangible.
Syntactically, OpenBadge assertions are made using JSON, I don’t think they use microdata. Through schema.org, LRMI uses microdata and JSON-LD.

aligning the alignment objects

The discussion that I hope to kick off with the Mozilla Open Badge and LRMI communities is should/could we make the similarities between the two alignment objects more explicit? This would give developers a two-for-one offer, understand the way Open Badges expresses alignment and you’ve understood what LRMI does, and vice versa. I don’t suppose either group wants to change a spec that is in productive use, but an informative statement about the similarities could be provided without changing either.

Beyond that I wonder if the Open Badge community have thought about use of schema.org when advertising badges, i.e. if you provide a webpage saying “we offer the following badges for X, Y and Z” would there be benefit in marking this up with schema.org microdata to improve discoverability by search engines? If there is benefit in doing so, then it would be worth thinking about what type of schema.org Thing badges are and how the LRMI alignment object might be attached to it.

The bigger picture is that someone working with the starting point of wanting to learn about something could find resources to help them learn it with the help of LRMI alignments and discover the means of showing that they had learnt it via Open Badge alignments.

aligning the alignment objects

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