SALT™ is the global leader in the emerging field of open learning ecosystems. PCG created SALT to lead and test creation of IMS Global’s new Competency and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE).
The CASE specification establishes a technical specification for ‘machine-readable’ academic standards, competency frameworks, and crosswalks. It provides the backbone index for the emerging e-learning ecosystem. Before CASE each content publisher and learning system vendor had the challenge of converting state learning standards published for print (PDFs) into data to enable tagging, discovery and use of content by recommendation engines and personalized learning solutions. With CASE, digital content can be tagged with learning standards or ‘competencies’ in one domain in such a way that it can be discovered and used in any other. For example, if a state like New York creates a repository of open education resources and tags it to its state academic standards, CASE would enable a user in another state, like Georgia to discover an use it using standards in that location. CASE also enables a state to more easily update its tags from one version of its own standards to the next.CASE becomes all the more important when used with assessment results. Without CASE there is no efficient way to align reporting categories from multiple assessments to state and local learning targets. Without CASE, personalized, competency-based education cannot fully leverage the power and openness of the Internet.