Support for using more fields of Material?

[hexylena]

I'm looking at https://github.com/ElixirTeSS/tess-bioschemas-scraper/blob/master/src/TessApi/Material.ts#L29-L36 and noticing that we use a lot of extra fields. I'm wondering if any of these are in-scope for scraping and pushing to TeSS?

• inLanguage - probably clear from the title but I think users might want to query on materials in language(s) they understand.
• accessModeSufficient/accessibilityControl/accessibilityFeature/accessibilitySummary - useful for disabled participants to know if a course is going to be available to them
• isAccessibleForFree - probably nice, too, right?
• timeRequired - I think many materials will advertise this, how long the learner should plan to follow a material.
• competencyRequired - we're using this to list a lot of pre-requisites that students should know before they start a learning material

We write pretty extensive json-ld and we've been really curious to follow the scraper progress just to make sure we are compliant, but it looks like currently the scraper only extracts a limited vocabulary so maybe we've gone overboard? :) Example of our markup is available in: https://training.galaxyproject.org/training-material/topics/assembly/tutorials/debruijn-graph-assembly/tutorial.html

[fbacall]

We've mostly been looking at scraping Events/CourseInstances to begin with, so the material scraping is pretty basic.

TeSS' Material model is also not fully aligned with the Bioschemas TrainingMaterial profile.

• inLanguage - We're currently running under the assumption that all the content is in English, which is probably not good, but we don't yet have a field to hold this info.
• accessModeSufficient/accessibilityControl/accessibilityFeature/accessibilitySummary - This is something we should probably support, and I'd be interested to see some examples of use for these fields. Events would also benefit from this I think.
• isAccessibleForFree - Again we're making an assumption that all materials are accessible for free. We do have a way of recording costs for Events, but not Materials.
• timeRequired - This would be useful too, but again we don't yet have a field to put this in.
• competencyRequired - In the upcoming release we have a "Prerequisites" free text field where this could go. We also have a "competency level" field but this is restricted to one of "Beginner", "Intermediate" and "Advanced".

I think marking up with as much information as possible is never a bad thing, as long as the information is accurate and semantically/structurally correct. TeSS' scrapers are run regularly, so as the markup (or the scraping code and TeSS' data model) is changed, we can update existing entries in TeSS with new metadata.

[hexylena]

Thanks @fbacall, I think I had the wrong impression of priorities, it makes sense now.

TeSS' scrapers are run regularly, so as the markup (or the scraping code and TeSS' data model) is changed, we can update existing entries in TeSS with new metadata.

can't wait to see our updated entries in TeSS! We (Galaxy) have been following the replacement scrapers progress for the last 2 years so we're really excited for this.

competencyRequired

• Ah a pre-requisites field sounds great!
• Yep, we've got the competency level under educationalLevel per bioschemas TrainingMaterial 1.0 so that sounds like it'll work.

accessibility

I think ours is marked up pretty well for a11y items:

  "accessMode": [
    "textual",
    "visual"
  ],
  "accessModeSufficient": [
    "textual",
    "visual"
  ],
  "accessibilityControl": [
    "fullKeyboardControl",
    "fullMouseControl"
  ],
  "accessibilityFeature": [
    "alternativeText",
    "structuralNavigation",
    "tableOfContents"
  ],
  "accessibilitySummary": "The text aims to be as accessible as possible. Image descriptions will vary per tutorial, from images being completely inaccessible, to images with good descriptions for non-visual users.",

it could use a few more accessibilityFeature items, but in general that's correct. Probably accessMode is one of the more important ones to surface, so learners know if the material is accessible via text, or video/audio content only. Same for accessibilityFeature that the material is structured semantically, and uses alt text properly.