Charter || Documents ||Minutes || Mailing List || Links

NOTE: The MACE CourseID group has completed its work and is dormant at present.
Please visit the MACE-Dir working group page
for the latest information and projects related to directories.

For easy reference the products of this workgroup are:

Goals of MACE-CourseID

Define a schema describing courses and course components that:

• conforms to IMS standards or requirements for course description
• maps readily from existing applications that utilize course descriptions
  such as administrative data systems, instructional management systems,etc.
• is valid for inter-institutional collaborations
• is Shibboleth compliant, to further leverage Shibboleth developments to
  enable authorization based on course enrollment.
• is valid for international collaborations

For more information on the status of these documents, see the Internet2 Document Guidelines. For reference see also the Internet2 Document Library.

NOTE WELL: All Internet2 Activities are governed by the Internet2 Intellectual Property Framework.

Charter

MACE-courseID, the Internet2 Middleware Architecture Committee for Education (MACE)  course data elements project, exists to further the development of course data elements for higher education and adapt exisiting development for use in directory enabled infrastructures. This project will leverage the eduPerson object class (http://www.educause.edu/eduperson/) that includes widely-used person attributes in higher education and build on the standards work in IMS and OKI.

Potential Uses

Course identifiers can be utilized for a variety of purposes such as allowing faculty to set access for course materials and auditing class compliance with graduation requirements. Ultimately, this information could expand to encompass a more standardized method of identifying courses at universities, which could lead to standardized university course schedules that could be mined across institutions for cross-organizational currculum analysis and development to develop curricular taxonomies across disciplines. Finally this information could enable the growing interest in identifying courses that are appropriate for credit transfers across universities or aid in streamlining university accreditation processes.

Important new content-sharing tools, such as the Shibboleth project within Internet2, will allow unparalleled secure access to resources but will require a widely adopted and interoperable directory-enabled infrastructure.

Solicitation for Members

The Role of Middleware

LDAP directories are at the heart of many of these essential services; serving as centralized repositories for information related to resources, and users and systems authorized to access these resources. The problem: there are few if any established patterns for building general-purpose institutional directories. Each institution has frequently had to start from scratch, and no two higher education directories look exactly alike. A number of recent developments have brought a sense of urgency to developing a common vocabulary for identifying resources and users, and to facilitating inter- and intra-institutional access to the proliferation of highly valuable network-accessible resources in a manner ensuring security, privacy, and data integrity, and with significant applications in higher education.

Mailing List

At present new subscriptions to the MACE-courseID list are closed. Please visit the MACE-Dir working group page and subscribe to the MACE-Dir mailing list for the latest information and projects in directories.

To unsubscribe from the MACE-CourseID list, send email to sympa at internet2 dot edu with the message body:

unsubscribe mace-courseID

Links - Overview

• Stanford CourseClass xml definition. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/infrastructure/registry/project/course_registry/xml/CourseClass.html
• Document Engineering for E-Berkeley at SIMS
  • Fall 2002 Project Reports
  • Final Course Project Report
  • Final Roles Project Report
  • BABL Project

Links - Technical

• Draft Course Domain Model CETIS/JISC (HTML) (PDF)
  Scott Wilson, October 23, 2003
• IMS - http://imsglobal.org/
• IMS Work in Progress List http://imsglobal.org/workinprogress.cfm
• IMS Specifications http://imsglobal.org/specifications.cfm
• IMS Enterprise specification, with the anchor at the Data Objects section. Note that "group" really means "class" in the IMS context. http://www.imsproject.org/enterprise/entv1p1/imsent_infov1p1.html#1426006 http://www.imsglobal.org/enterprise/index.cfm
• Resource List Interoperability - This effort is defining a specification for the interoperability of resource lists (e.g. reading lists) between Library Information Management Systems and elearning systems, such as Course Management Systems. http://imsglobal.org/rliCharter.pdf
• The IMS Persistent, Location-Independent Resource Identifier implementation handbook addresses the need for persistent, location-independent, resource identifiers across multiple IMS specifications. http://imsglobal.org/implementationhandbook/imsrid_handv1p0.html
• OKI Service Interface Definitions (SIDs). OKI, focuses on the structural aspect, distiguishing between abstract courses, their offerings, and their sections.
  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/okiproject/OkiSIDs_rc3.zip?download
• The DOI is a GUID that allows resolution of multiple instances of object location and is a permanent
  identifier. Resolution is used to mean the act of submitting an identifier to a network service and receiving in return one or more pieces of current information related to the identifier. www.doi.org