The Living Schoolbook

Of course a "Goal Aware" Tool can tag an assignment with learning outcomes.

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If I start to think about the tool in a more generic sense, I can see how we will be able to apply many different types of metadata to activities.

Lately I have been thinking about some different uses for the "Goal Aware" tools  idea which has led me to the conclusion that the tool is named wrong.  It should be characterized as a "Activity Metadata Tag" tool.  Branding is funny though.  Names suggest use and I was afraid that "Metadata tool" would elicit blank stares from my main audience of higher education faculty. 

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" (new term suggestions are encouraged!) will provides a "handle" or "node" 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.

Here's the kicker, though...  I was considering the possibility of making the "Goal Management Tool" capable of publishing sets of learning outcomes as IMS compliant competencies.  This would allow us to make tools in other systems aware of the same learning outcome metadata as Sakai.  However, if we decide to characterize the tool as a metadata tool, can we do that?  Decision points are not leaning outcomes.  Publishing metadata sets as such makes little sense unless each set can be configured to publish per the correct standard (if there is one).