1EdTech’s Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) standard is the heart of an institution's digital ecosystem. It can connect all digital resources to applicable academic standards, competencies, or skills that were designed to align with learners. To get teachers and students the richly tagged content and assessments they deserve, CASE tags learning resources with the data needed for teachers and district staff to search for and design lessons.
CASE is a technical specification that establishes a standard way to exchange information about academic standards, competencies, and learning outcomes across platforms and applications.
A CASE framework is a hierarchically structured digital version of the static versions (PDF, Word, Excel, or HTML) of academic standards, learning objectives, or competencies documents. It is available for download and upload into platforms and applications. Each academic standard or competency gets a unique identifier called a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) when implemented.
CASE makes it possible to track progress toward learning outcomes by consistently tracking academic standards and competencies.
The impact on teaching and the learning cycle:
- Institutions and suppliers can make consistent use of the CASE GUIDs to tag lessons and resources.
- Institutions can associate academic standards with course content and verify the existence of resources aligned to all the academic standards associated with a course or program.
- Users can search for digital resources aligned to specific academic standards and add them to the course.
- Instructors or course designers can upload tagged content to their LMS or create content in the LMS and tag it to the respective academic standards.
- Instructors and course designers can ensure resources associated with a specific academic standard/competency are offered in multiple formats, languages, language level(s), object types, etc., to address variable needs.
- Users can track student engagement with aligned resources and compare (for example) time-on-task with learning outcomes.
- Educators and learners can track progress toward mastery via tagged activities, assignments, and assessment results.
- Administrators can track user engagement in relation to the lesson design/learning materials aligned to each standard.
- Instructional designers can modify a lesson and its resources when the outcomes are consistently ineffective.
- Applications, platforms, and tools are able to transfer formative and summative data (grades) using consistent GUIDs, breaking the data silos between platforms and applications/resources.
- Instructors can identify who has mastered each learning outcome and who needs supplemental materials to achieve mastery.
- Administrators can get actionable data by comparing outcomes between different schools and/or courses in a school system and provide additional support as needed.
The benefits of CASE include:
- Reduces the manual effort and saves the time for state departments of education, districts, and other official entities to manually produce, update, and share academic standards, competencies, and learning outcomes
- Provides a way to automatically exchange information about academic standards, competencies, and learning outcomes across platforms and applications
- Exchanges and publishes via CASE with standardized API endpoints
- Updates and sharing new versions of academic standards, competencies, and learning outcomes is easy if suppliers are Certified CASE Consumers or Certified CASE Providers
- Applications and tools using CASE can provide unique identifiers for easier use to tag learning resources with academic standards, competencies, learning outcomes, and course content downstream
- CASE can be used to connect learning standards, competencies, and learning outcomes to digital credentials
Get to Know CASE Network 2
CASE Network 2, hosted by Common Good Learning Tools, is a central repository of academic standards and competency frameworks available for everyone to browse and search, for issuing agencies to publish their standards in CASE format, and for suppliers to consume these and other learning standards from one convenient source.
The goal of CASE Network 2 is to support the open education ecosystem by mirroring the academic standards published by issuing agencies (“CASE Issuers.”)
More information about CASE Network 2 can be found here.
Technical Overview
The CASE 1.0 specification facilitates the exchange of information about academic standards, competencies, and learning outcomes. CASE can also transmit information about rubrics and criteria on the performance of tasks. The CASE specification also supports association between frameworks, so frameworks and items can be related and aligned.
The specification defines a method for (CASE) providers to exchange academic standards, competencies, and learning outcomes data to make their framework data available to (CASE) consumers in REST API exchange format.
CASE Includes:
- A digitally formatted hierarchical CASE Framework document with individual (CASE Items)academic learning objectives, competencies, and/or skills. Each has a Global Unique Identifier (GUID) for that standard. A CASE Framework has a vertical hierarchy (Parent/Child) of competencies and their associations.
- A CASE Rubric (optional). A Rubric can be used in CASE to exchange the depth of knowledge for each standard, competency, or skill.
- CASE Associations. An Association can be made between CASE Framework documents and items to other CASE Frameworks, documents, or items with standards, competencies, or skills frameworks.
More about the 1EdTech CASE two supplier roles, Service Provider and Service Consumer.
- A CASE Service Provider - The Provider publishes the standards in CASE Format. In K-12 education, states are the owners of standards. A number of states have published their standards using CASE and others are in the process of doing so. A state might choose to hire a Certified CASE Service Provider to publish and host their frameworks for them. Providers can also be foundations, industry associations, and other committed nonprofit organizations to support the creation of common career competency standards and frameworks that can lead to digital credentials.
- A CASE Service Consumer can be a learning/content management system, Learning Object Repository (LOR), curriculum or assessment provider, or other learning applications/tools. The tool or platform consumes (ingests) CASE Frameworks, like a database, via an application programming interface (API). When organizations create lesson plans and add digital content tagged to the competencies/academic standards’ GUIDs, the application or platform can match each lesson, content, activity or assessment to the learning standards by matching the metatags, and provide educators outcomes and other data reports.
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