It’s staggering to think about how much data is leveraged to organize, schedule and teach a college course. An idea germinating in a faculty member’s mind sprouts into a syllabus, with a list of topics to be studied, books to be read and assignments to complete. From there, staff in the scheduling office pore over classroom availability charts and slot the course into a time and location. Before the first meeting, the faculty member creates his or her course website and students pick up their textbooks.

If all of this information could be made available to students in its “tagged” form — marked as dates, books or locations, just like it is in the database — then students would be able to construct their own interfaces for interpreting it. Rising from the humble foundations of course location and meeting time data, we may be on the verge of a shift from large, difficult-to-maintain and institution-provided student applications toward organically-created, small-scale widgets that directly attack particular student problems.

For all the work that goes into creating and manipulating this data (all before the course even begins!), most of it remains underutilized and disconnected. Take course meeting dates, for example. As soon as faculty members receive their section time assignments from the scheduling office, they sit down and plot out reading assignments and lecture topics for each course meeting. They probably compile the information into a syllabus and throw it up on their course website, as well as hand it out in paper on the first day of class. But once the information goes into the syllabus, it can’t be pulled out again. It’s just a block of text.

In short, they’ve taken information that had been “tagged” as dates, textbooks or topics and transformed it into something readable by humans, but bereft of the context that would let a computer recognize the individual components. The information hasn’t been lost; students in the course can just read the syllabus and figure out what’s what. But it’s definitely less obvious — at least to a computer — where in the syllabus book titles end and lecture topics begin, for instance. What started as data in a database (*only* readable by computer) would now be very difficult for a computer to recover from the syllabus.

At some point in the process, tagged data has to be collapsed into something students can easily decipher, and a lot of the time that means printing out M/W/F @ 10am instead of <hours of the week: [34, 82, 130]>. But in general, the longer you can delay converting tagged data into untagged data, the better the experience ends up being for the student. Let’s take our course meeting time example a little further. The course catalog, the timetable, the syllabus — these interfaces display course meeting times in the untagged M/W/F form. That’s not the only form for displaying date and time information, however. If we’re trying to see how courses will fit on a weekly schedule, we’d probably prefer a 5-day calendar with hourly time slots. For planning a trip away for the holidays, a student will want a monthly or even semesterly calendar displaying little more than which courses meet on which dates.

The cool thing is, we don’t have to develop software to display date and time information in all of these different ways. We often do — the 5-day calendar is a staple in our catalog products, and we like to use sliders to represent lengths of time — but most students already have iCal or Outlook or Google Calendar set up on their computers. So once students use our schedule optimizer tools to sort out their schedules, we let them download the information — labeled by course — in .ics format, so they can import it into any scheduling program they want and manipulate it as they see fit.

That’s pretty cool, but the dream is much bigger. Before even beginning their readings and homework, students probably spend 15-20 minutes getting things organized. They have to find the syllabus, see what chapters and assignments are due, print out articles and prompts and collect all of their notes and books. It doesn’t have to be that way. If students (and their computers) have access to the contextual markup for readings and assignments, then we’re one step closer to a world where students can view academic content in a variety of different forms, just like the different ways of looking at date and time information. At the beginning of the semester, students will want a plot for each book marking the parts of it they’ll be reading, so they can get a visual feel for the focus of the course and quantity of reading. They’ll probably also want a calendrical overview of major course dates like midterms, paper due dates and final exams. But once the course kicks into gear, they’re going to want to switch to a more focused, daily view that automatically collects all of their assignments and readings and provides a detailed summary of their tasks for the day. And what’s best for studying prior to an exam may be some combination of views, where students can seamlessly switch between focusing on a particular topic to looking at single day’s readings to checking off items they’ve revisited on a book list or semester-long calendar.

Some of the software to interpret and display contextual data will be (and has been) built by companies like ours. But if the tagged data is available, students will use it to build tools that they find useful, and at no cost to institutions. I can imagine a simple widget that looks at the courses a student has enrolled in, compares the required textbooks and the dates those books are assigned to be read, and lets the student know which books can be bought through an online retailer and still arrive in time. It’s simple, it’s useful, but it’s not something that is (or should be) a priority for the campus IT team.

Here at Verba, we design our software from the ground-up to support contextual data. Most public data can be retrieved in XML format, and the HTML pages we output are constructed “semantically,” making it easy for the data to be reconstituted even without explicit tags. We’re going to keep innovating on this front, and we’re excited to see the landscape change towards more choice over the next few years.