States and school districts across the U.S. are accelerating adoption of digital resources and beginning to explore personalized, competency-based learning. However, most find it challenging to progress beyond initial, small-scale efforts, in part because their academic standards are published as documents (PDFs) that must be manipulated to be used by learning technology tools. PCG has led the effort to solve this problem on a global scale through three interconnected layers of a solution:
- Industry Technical Standards
PCG's work, in collaboration with HMH, D2L, ACT, SchoolCity, Capella University, Trinity Education Group, SAFARI Montage, Instructure, Elumen, Learning Objects, IBM, Pearson, the Georgia Department of Education, Houston Independent School District, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, and the Texas Education Agency, led to the creation of a new IMS Global™ technical specification called the Competency and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE™). CASE establishes a global technical standard for the exchange of machine readable, linked data versions of state and national learning standards, local learning objectives and targets, and any workplace, military, or higher education competencies representing skills, knowledge, or abilities. - Open Source Software
PCG, also worked with ACT, and SchoolCity to build an open source tool that enables users to create, edit, crosswalk, and publish academic standards and competency frameworks as CASE frameworks through an API. The Standards Alignment Tool (SALT™) is being used by the Houston Independent Schools District, Georgia Department of Education, and major publishers like the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to manage their CASE frameworks. OpenSALT.org provides technical resources and links to a GitHub repository where OpenSALT™ can be downloaded for free and without restriction through an MIT license. - Trusted source for state academic standards crosswalks
PCG has created an open, trusted data service, based on CASE, to crosswalk state and national academic standards that can be used to tag and discover content, align competency-based assessment results, and extend to local, derivative competency frameworks