CASE means local control
I was recently in Gwinnett, GA for a fantastic CASE conference. (image courtesy Dr Keith Osburn). Huge thanks to the districts, fellow suppliers/vendors and IMS Global. While there, one of many things that came up was the way each district uses standards varies and that perhaps there can’t be a, “primary use case.” Some districts use their State standards, others break them apart ro change things to better fit into their courses or scope and sequence, still others do a lot with curriculum mapping so want the skills within the standards explicitly stated on official documents. All of them want the standards to be flexible which is what CASE should provide, but thus far a CASE compliant application hasn’t done exactly what they need.
CASE as a specification for standards/competency frameworks/courses is actually perfect for this. Associations in CASE allow for locally created standards so still have hooks t national or state frameworks for reasons of accountability or assessment/resource curation. Yet, that uniquely local framework is the creation of that local group, They can rename the human coding scheme if they want (Eg from GSE.2010 to GCS.2011). When CASE makes a connection between statement, it’s linking t the machine readable identifier behind the scenes, not the actual item that others see.
A perfect example of this was in ACT Holistic Framework’s 2.0 version of the Language Arts and Literacy Framework, there were significant changes to the human coding scheme and often where certain statements were in the
hierarchy, Before, it would have been difficult to tell at all where things had gone without looking at the text, but the ReplacedBy association keeps things accurate, because the associations were between objects not codes. In a general sense, this means that states/districts can always be sure they are using accurately aligned standards and learning objects, because there is a permanent, traceable path back to the source.
The more districts want to create their own standards and the further states go from common core, the more important this concept will be. In addition, Association Groups in CASE allow for districts to build crosswalks that can be versioned and shared in the same CASE format. All of this matters not just fr accurate standards alignment but everything that goes with it — lessons, resources, assessments, and eventually through these things funding.
The Gwinnet-hosted CASE summit type of collaboration and listening on the part of the suppliers (myself included!) is exactly what’s needed to drive further adoption of open standards. For more on CASE, see imsglobal.org/case or find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
