What is the essential metadata for reusable teaching module?

[cboettig]

We and others have identified not only a lack of educational material in the domain of domain specific data management, reproducible workflows, and open science, but also the high barriers to re-use, collaborative development, and branch/diff/merge process in lesson development. In this repo we hope to map out new teaching materials covering these topics in a way that promotes that same collaborative development of the materials themselves.

A key question in designing material that can be adopted, adapted, and contributed back to a lessons commons is identifying the basic metadata a lesson needs to have to fit it into other lessons. (We might think of such metadata from a software perspective as inter-lesson interface or API).

Examples of such metadata might include:

• Prerequisites students will need to engage in the material (e.g. intro stats or intro programming in language x)
• Define audience / domain area for the lesson (undergraduates in environmental science)
• What skills or knowledge are taught
• What should students be able to do after finishing the module
• Any related mechanisms of assessment of that knowledge and skill (hw, tests)

A textbook is probably the canonical teaching module: it's usually obvious where to find all of this metadata and relatively easy for an instructor to pick up the textbook and adapt it for use in a course or section of a course. However, most textbooks do not lend themselves to remixing and I'm not sure any exist that cover the skills we're interested in covering. This also raises the question of whether textbook is the wrong level of granularity.

Others should chime in here about other essential metadata and how this might fit together.