During discussion about a German Hub for courses we discussed also about the structure of subject items. The history of this field is well known. It was decided to take the Australian structure from Bureau of statistics for educational statistics. Its based on UNESCO category scheme with some local changes.
We've a suggestion for changing the concept for subject items that will work as long as we don't implement a meta search on several hubs.
Actually the subject item structure is called on the local Moodle system via /course/publish and /block/community code. The structure of the items (list of items and hierarchy) is taken from a language file edufields.php.
This concept doesn't allow any changes for local hubs in the item structure. If we want to implement local hub defined item structure we have to move this structure from the Moodle system to the local hubs.
How could it work from the user perspective:
- The user selects a hub where he wants to search for courses.
- A new page opens with the search form.
- The structure of search items for subjects and optionally for levels is loaded from the remote hub server.
The same happens when a course will be published.
For the hub plugin it requires the definition of subject and level structure. My sugestion is to define the actual subject structure as default setting. A local structure can replace the default structure by XML upload.
This requires that the structure is not stored in language file, but in database. There is one problem I don't have an idea how to solve: how can we make a local structure translatable.