Country agnostic academic level representation

Question

Hi guys, my product owner came to me with this problem:

Our application supports multi-language and is used by users in different countries. OK! On a form the user is asked to supply the academic level of a person. OK!

The problem is that academic levels do not exactly match between countries. I suggested we define agnostic levels and then just give their representative name for each country depending on the selected language for example.

Am I thinking of it correctly? Sure this is no new problem, anyone got it? How have you solved it?

Thanks! Alex

Answer 1

This is a fairly common problem that can be solved using agnostic items, but in most situations, the form is modified for the specific country's needs. This will ensure the site is user friendly for each individual country.

Answer 2

I doubt that it's safe to assume that all countries that speak the same language will have the same academic structure. Spain vs. Mexico? USA vs. U.K.? etc.

Better to first obtain their country, then customize the academic level selections accordingly.

Answer 3

If you have pre defined levels and you just have to display them according to the users language setting, then you can use resource files.

You can use resource files for multilingual support. You can find information on how to do this here

YOu can create common a webpage and define either local or global resource files. Create the language and culture specific resource files (like es-mx for Spanish language and Mexican culture or fr for french) and once this is done based on the language setting in the users browser, the corresponding language resources are used and displayed on the webpages.

Answer 4

I'm assuming that by "academic levels" you mean what we here in America would call associates degree, bachelor's degree, masters, and doctorate. Right?

Frankly I don't know a lot about the educational programs of other countries.

You might be able to do this by making the neutral representation be the integer number of years of post-elementary education, assuming the student takes the "standard" amount of time. Thus in the US the translation would be 2=Associates, 4=Bachelors, 6=Masters, 8=Doctorate. In Australia you'd have something like 1=Diploma, 2=Advanced Diploma, 3=Bachelors, 4=Honor Bachelors, 5=Postgraduate, 6=Masters, 8=Doctorate. In Europe, it would be 3=Bachelor, 5=Master, 8=Doctor. Etc.

But as I say, I don't know a lot about other country's degree titles, so I may be way oversimplifying in assuming this would work.

Answer 5

I would use country-based localization to accomplish this. This doesn't sound like a problem that can necessarily be genericized across the board. That doesn't mean you can't use any overlap at all-there's probably a lot of code reuse possible between the US and European education system, for instance, and recognizing instances like that will save you a significant amount of time.

Your tags indicate you're doing this project in C#, which supports both localization resource files and inheritance. Take full advantage of both of those to reuse all the code you can without trying to stuff things in a container they don't fit in, and you can have a page that allows the user to select a country and have an experience fully in line with that country's education system quite quickly.