Thoughts on how to make CASE better

I’ve written, podcasted and talked a LOT about CASE over the years and why machine-readable standards matter if we want to truly level the playing field of the school to career pipeline.

So it’s been interesting as I noted in my 2022 Learning Impact retrospective to be simply a CASE consumer and not ‘shepherd’ (I was CASE working group co chair for 2 years).

A few ideas that mean nothing because I’m currently not at all affiliated with 1Edtech efforts in any way.

CASE needs more clear public examples.

Originally we would point to Georgia’s standards in digital form which was GREAT, but we need to have easy examples with implementation ‘instruction’s on the IMS website for:

• Standards in CASE (done!)
• State Standard -> Derivative District Standards (Looking at you Georgia)
• Crosswalks (even a sample is great)
• Showing how CASE can help solve versioning issues (can it?)
• Open Badges with CASE GUID’s
• Workforce Skills Frameworks in CASE
• Learning Object → CASE alignments (and why that’s important)
• Learning Pathways expressed in CASE with… examples of how that’s useful
• How assessment applications can use CASE relationships for better remediation across subjects
• Courses/Curricular pathways with Exemplar resources like how Achievethecore used to have with its Coherence Map which no one remembers anymore but was in many ways my inspiration for wanting to get into digital standards work!

2. CASE needs to be more lightweight to implement

While it’s great that CASE has a three part structure and dozens of fields/possibilities, it’s too ambiguous when most States still are required to have ‘human coding scheme, fullstatement, grade’ etc — limited by how the state standards are published.

In addition, at least from what I’ve seen trying to use CASE in it’s native JSON can be complicated because the JSON — CSV converters on the web get confused by the three part structure. It’s a pretty common use case, and not everyone can write scripts to do it.

3. CASE folks needs to emphasize connections across… everything

The whole point of machine readable competencies is to connect learning objects, pathways and eventually, help make students more successful. CASe is just an export format for crying out loud, but at least when I was involved a few years ago that discussion of “what do standards actually mean…” led to VERY healthy discussions on what curriculum can do, why it’s more important to the actual standards, etc.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, there’s been a ton of amazing work since CASE was first published in the summer of 2017. It was so great to see so many people aware of it, supporting it and starting to use it more and more for the reasons that it should be! I hope to contribute from the workforce skills side more soon.