Why is CASE important?

Note to anyone reading this from ACT: This started out as an internal email when someone asked me why they should care about CASE and was expanded/refined for posting here.

As a teacher I was interested in how standards ‘fitting’ together in progressions could help me design better instructional modules and help figure out what information kids were missing. I’ve started an occasional podcast about edtech interoperability… episode one is my ‘why I care’ episode — I’m recording an episode about CASE with my CASE taskforce co-chair next week!

At OpenEd.com being in charge of the content team and standards, we were frustrated that we had to link between different state standards because people want localized standards… But the digital standards we could see were often missing information, arranged interestingly, and more importantly didn’t have connections to other topics built in. There are options for that, but they are prohibitively expensive for most of the market.

So in a classic case of “if you keep asking questions about it someone is going to have you start working on it) three years ago in addition to my duties curating math resources and leading a team, I was asked to be the product manager for a standards mapping tool we were going to create from scratch. A few months later we merged ideas with the OpenSALT team that had been developing a proof of concept for several months. I’d never heard of CASE when I started (because it wasn’t released until the summer of 2017!). but joined the workgroup and did a lot of reading/experimenting/asking. Last February I was asked to be the co-chair of the CASE taskforce and I’ve been able to help move along things like improving the implementation guide, hopefully bring some organization and straightforwardness to the weekly meetings and have learned a lot in the process.

Learning taxonomies built in CASE are designed to be as flexible and informative as possible. I’ve seen CASE frameworks as courses, taxonomies, even crosswalk-only frameworks.

The core focus of the framework should be the competency statement itself — any information that enriches that statement can be represented as an association.

We see this flexibility in the ACT Holistic Framework Language Arts subject taxonomy. We can see how this particular standard relates to the College and Career Readiness Standards, but not as ‘part of the statement’ — but enhancing it with associations.

This approach — keeping the competency statement simple, but able to be added onto with additional associations (particularly Exemplar Of — aka examples of mastery of the competency), help make CASE a fairly lightweight standard that can be utilized in a variety of use cases — from open badges to LMS’s.

The future is bright for CASE as a way to make PDF-based standards documents a dying breed and richer, more informative documents a reality!