There has been some work going on within the Internet2 Middleware Architecture Committee for Education (MACE) on developing a standard set of data elements for describing courses and course components (including underlying data models), very much focused on facilitating inter-institutional resource sharing (including a graceful interaction with Shibboleth). I do not believe that this work is too widely known yet in the broader community that has interests in this area. The MACE group has released a draft recently for comment, and I would urge interested parties to review it and offer feedback to the authors.

The page describing the initiative broadly is

http://middleware.internet2.edu/courseid/

and the draft for comment is at

http://middleware.internet2.edu/courseid/docs/draft-ag-hz-course-id-04.htm

as well as being linked from the Documents section on the main page.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI