Presentation on paradata in the context of standards used in education technology. Presentation given at the IDEA012 conference ( http://www.idea.edu.au/?page_id=56 ), panel on "Standards development for open content and online assessment", Dec 5 2012

1. Education Services Australia
Paradata Standard
Nick Nicholas

2. 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)

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. 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

7. 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)”

8. 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

9. 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

10. Links
• Learning Registry:
• http://www.learningregistry.org/documents
• http://www.commoncorelabs.com/
• TinCan:
• http://www.adlnet.gov/capabilities/tla/exp
erience-api
• ActivityStreams:
• http://activitystrea.ms/
• Australian Paradata Blog
• http://australianparadata.wordpress.com