CASE Associations
The foundational technology of the internet is that webpages are related to one another. If you’ve ever wondered what HTTP stands for that you see at the beginning of any website address, it’s Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. (Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML is the basis for most web pages).
It’s these connections that really make the internet what it is. After all what good would going to google be if you had to copy and paste the links it gave you from a search? Or even worse if it just told you the name of the webpage but not where to find it?
The world of Academic Standards, the Common Core and derivative frameworks reign supreme when it comes to usage in schools. Most states are derived from the Common Core with a handful of changes. Yet competencies are a growing thing — we’re seeing more and more interest in the business world as groups hope to better define the skills people need to do jobs that do or don’t exist yet. Clearly the Common Core is becoming outdated as the world shifts towards more vocational and workforce continuums as well as traditional college/post-secondary education options. Yet our systems for recording what a student knows have remained the same.
For example, in college, I was a double major in mathematics and psychology. There was an intro to Statistics class for the psychology major, but I challenged it and proved my knowledge of the course material. This makes sense and saved me both time and money. That kind of thing needs to happen more often. If my academic advisors had been able to see that before I called a meeting (admittedly, it was 2002 so probably before my college had a digital transcript available to professors) I could have saved some time and skipped the course without the hassle I went through. Not everyone — particularly the most vulnerable of students — can take off 4+ years of their life to learn. Learning cycles are becoming shorter, more focused (which some could argue is a bad thing/making them less prepared for future changes). Connecting competencies can help create a more accurate picture of what a student knows and to what level. That can in turn be translated and verified with open badges, and students may be closer to a credential that will help get them a job than they realize.
There are other rich metadata description formats for competencies and their associations. But often they have been plagued by either too many association types or the competency representation service is owned by a private company not the states themselves (Academic Benchmarks, ASN). CASE has only a handful of association types which is a strength for the industry. The specification itself (CASE) is supported by an industry consortium and the frameworks will obstinately hosted by the publishing organization itself — such as in the case of Georgia, etc.
The point of connecting competency statements with associations at all is to to better serve students the learning resources they need.
If more or less association types are demanded by the industry the specification will change to meet needs. There are discussions for OpenSALT to add an annotation column to make the framework associations easier for humans to read; but the bottom line is that the associations between frameworks needs to be unambiguous. That is, if I am saying that a common core high school standard works well with a standard in a Workforce standard, I can make that using RelatedTo and thus be able to use learning resources available in a learning management system.
More states and organizations are adopting CASE as the backbone of their standards metadata ecosystem. Now we need a public unveiling of those connections (even if for a price) to help the industry see just how “relatedTo,” competencies across domains really are!
