At this year’s Learning Impact Leadership Institute IMS Global, recognized Public Consulting Group (PCG) and the Georgia Department of Education (GA DOE) with a Learning Impact Platinum Award for their work driving the creation and initial adoption of the new Competency and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) specification.  For a description of this work please see the video here.  Earlier that week, IMS Global announced its intention to create a new 50-State CASE Registry selected PCG to launch and operate this service.  When it launches this summer, the CASE Registry service is expected to provide free, open, trusted CASE frameworks from all 50 states.

CASE establishes a technical specification for ‘machine-readable’ academic standards, competency frameworks, and crosswalks. Before CASE, content publishers and learning system vendors alike had the challenge of converting state academic standards and competency frameworks 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 tagged with learning standards or ‘competencies’ in one domain can be discovered and used in another.  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 to discover and 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 even 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 and personalized, competency-based education cannot fully leverage the power and openness of the Internet. CASE provides the backbone index for the emerging e-learning ecosystem.

PCG drove the creation of the CASE specification out of its experiences developing the technology and content for EngageNY. PCG brought those experiences to Houston ISD to solve the problems presented by the existing market failures. At the behest of our customer at HISD, and in support of a second contract with The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia, over a two-year period the PCG team successfully created and led the CASE Task Force. This task force developed the CASE specification adopted by IMS Global in August 2018 and developed an open source tool called OpenSALT to manage and publish CASE data as a web service. By sharing OpenSALT (the Standards Alignment Tool) under the least restrictive MIT open source license, PCG opened the door for collaborators and competitors alike to more easily publish and consume CASE data.

Greg Nadeau
Manager
Public Consulting Group
gnadaeu@pcgus.com

Keith Osburn 
Associate State Superintendent
Georgia Department of Education
kosburn@doe.k12.ga.us

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