Different Ways to Use Frameworks
Competency Frameworks can be more than simple lists of skills
This short post will showcase a few ways different organizations are publicly creating competency frameworks to meet their data needs in different ways. This is by no means an exhaustive or ‘official’ list but a good place to start!
The Competency Framework
ACT published the ACT Holistic Framework (Consisting of Academic, Cross Cutting, Behavioral and Career and Education Navigation Domains) in 2017 in basic form so the public can see the skills that form the backbone of the company. In addition, ACT invited experts to comment on the framework statements themselves through a coordinated media campaign. We called this Open Governance as the ACT Holistic Framework is considered the “North Star” of our transformation to a learning, measurement and navigation company.
The Competency statements themselves (CFItem in CASE parlance) can also be used in:
Any Learning Object Repository that has implemented LTI Resource Search
The State Framework
As the above video shows, the need for the CASE specification arose when
Texas realized how digital content providers were representing the TEKS was not accurate. Thus, it has been very exciting to see not just Texas representing their standards in CASE, but Georgia, South Carolina and more! Instead of publishing their standards in static PDF’s, states can utilize the power and flexibility of CASE to provide edtech providers the best form of their standards in digital form.
Content Specifications
Smarter Balanced has worked with Public Consulting Group for the past couple of years to digitize all of their performance task documentation. As the image shows, now that the documentation is published folks can search a living digital document instead of multiple PDF’s — with the additional benefit of easily being able to ingest these performance task specifications elsewhere as required.
Using other frameworks to provide additional metadata
CASE associations aren’t just for denoting information between entire framework sets, but can also be used as clarifying statements for an item itself. Smarter Balanced for example currently uses RelatedTo to show different item types (which is itself a separate framework object) to easily show a list of item types that is more flexible than just listing them in the framework document. Other ways this time of adding information-by-associations could be glossary or elaboration frameworks, linking instruction sets with assessment definitions, and more.
Crosswalks
There are no public examples of this yet, but it should be possible to create a framework that is just a collection of the CfAssociations between perhaps a State Framework and an organizations framework of necessary skills. A CASE framework is a package that contains a Document, Item, Associations, Rubric, and more. Thus a crosswalk wouldn’t have any items, but it would be a list of Associations that could be imported to a server and serve to attach to the identifiers already present. Accurate crosswalks between
organizations/states/other government entities will help open up new markets and allow open educational resources to be accurately aligned across domains and regions. Of note, crosswalks (collections of associations) usually simply reside in the base framework itself but this example is thinking of a time when the base framework itself doesn’t need to be loaded.
Conclusion
Open, reliable frameworks published in CASE are already doing the work to make competency framework creation and associations easier for learning organizations to organize assessment and learning information. In addition, having the “standards’ information in a native digital format brings with it the ability to greater enhance metadata and lessen confusion for teachers, students, policymakers and other stakeholders.
