I am somewhat late in writing this, but back in May some new properties developed by LRMI were added to schema.org that simplify and expand how schema.org can be used to describe learning resources and educational events.

The new properties are:

teaches: The item being described is intended to help a person learn the competency or learning outcome defined by the referenced term.

assesses: The item being described is intended to assess the competency or learning outcome defined by the referenced term.

These are added as properties of CreativeWork and EducationEvent, and can both be used with either a DefinedTerm or text as the value (or URL, which is an allowed value for any schema.org property).

In a related change, the domain of educationalLevel, (“the level in terms of progression through an educational or training context”), which was added last year for EducationalOccupationalCredentials was expanded so that it can also be used with CreativeWork and EducationEvent. It also can have DefinedTerms, text or URL as a value.

As well as providing a way of describing the educational characteristics of EducationEvents, which was previously not possible, these changes simplify how learning resources can be described. Previously in order to describe these characteristice one had to use the educationalAlignment property and an AlignmentObject with alignmentType property of “teaches”, “assesses” or “educationalLevel”. Not only was this a somewhat complex indirect way of saying something simple, but we think that the use the AlignmentObject had the effect of hiding the availability of these important properties.

Having DefinedTerm as a value means that one can still describe the value as being drawn from an educational framework, the framework being modeled as a DefinedTermSet, just as one could when using various properties of the AlignmantObject. In fact there is the improvement that you can now provide a URL for the framework being used, not just the url of the target term and the name of the framework. Here are a couple of examples:

{
    "@context": "http://schema.org/",
    "@type": "CreativeWork",
    "name": "Designing a treasure map",
    "educationalLevel": {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "US Grade Levels",
        "name": "2",
        "url": "http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/2"
    },
    "url": "http://example.org/lessonplan"
}

{
  "@context":  "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "WebPage",
  "name": "The Declaration of Arbroath",
  "about": "Wars of Scottish independence",
  "learningResourceType": "lesson plan",
  "educationalLevel": [
    {
      "@type": "DefinedTerm",
      "name": "Level 2",
      "inDefinedTermSet": {
           "@type": "DefinedTermSet",
           "name": "SCQF",
           "url": "https://scqf.org.uk/"
       }
    },
    {
      "@type": "DefinedTerm",
      "name": "KS 3",
      "inDefinedTermSet": {
          "@type": "DefinedTermSet",
          "name": "The National Curriculum for England",
          "url": "https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum"
      }
    }
  ],
  "url" : "http://example.org/lessonplan",
  "isBasedOn": "http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/clips/z3sjtfr"
}

The educationalAlignment and AlignmentObject are still valid terms, and indeed are still the only means of describing some other educational characteristics of learning resources. However, going forward, we suggest you use the new teaches, assesses, educationalLevel properties in preference.

We will add these new terms to the DCMI LRMI namespace shortly, I hope, giving them a stable existence independent of schema.org.

Next steps?

If you’re interested in what may be coming next, here’s some of what has been discussed.

A property to express “the skill, knowledge or competence a learner needs before using a learning resource” is on our list of simple properties, which would complete the trio of requires, teaches, assesses. However the name “requires” has lead to confusion over what is required (a pen and paper?) and by whom/what.

Also, take a look at the schema.org gitub issue 1401 and you will see plans and discussion around creating a class for learning resources. I hope this will be limited to CreativeWorks and will sit alongside EducationEvent acting as a convenient place to find the properties relevant to describing educational characteristics, and also allowing such properties to  be used when describing Videos, Books, Products, etc as learning resources (i.e. by declaring LearningResource as an additional type) without needing to add education-specific properties higher up the schema.org hierarchy.