The Living Schoolbook

When we were designing the Goal Aware API we consistently talked about the metadata that we were adding to activities in terms of "Learning Outcomes".  "Learning outcome aware" is a bit of a mouthful though and so it was shortened to "Goal Aware".  

During talks with others we all recognized that this idea could be very generic and be characterized more generally as "metadata aware".  The "rating junction" provides a "handle" where we can attach lots of different metadata and draw new meaning out of the way that metadata is being used.  For example, we realized that we needed a way to tag each assessment in our system with a "decision point".  A decision point is metadata to describe a program specific event where a review of a student's performance on key assessments is performed.  The "reviewer" needs to be able to pull up performance data related to the school's standards for that decision point.  Often this spans multiple terms and is subject to change over time.   

In order to achieve this we merely need to create a new "Goal Set"/"Metadata Set" that holds the decision point names and link the decision points to the appropriate assessments.