Making CASE Easier to Understand
It’s been two years since I’ve been involved with CASE work officially, but I’m pleased to still get requests from folks for information about interoperability stuff on LinkedIn fairly often and love it!
Recently a friend I met at the last 1EdTech Learning Impact conference (formerly IMS Global’s Learning Impact Conference) asked me about some things in CASE that were confusing to someone just getting involved. I’ll just list his questions and my responses (Write an email, get a free blog post!)
1. Why does everything start with CF?
In the earlier days, when folks like Greg Nadeau and Joshua Marks of PCG first proposed CASE, CFTF was the working name of the specification standing simply for Competency Framework.
2. Why is the API so heavy?
The CASE API seems more than what I would need to get the information, but doesn’t seem to be enough for me to use it as searching tool and avoid parsing the documents. I am not sure why the API is as rich as it is.
It’s heavy to provide context and because everytime someone pulls a CF Item, they should be able to connect to any other part of the framework that is needed. There was a lot of talk of adding JSON-LD (context specification) to the standard CASE API; but as far as I know that was available ‘in addition to’ the core API. On CF Associations in particular, it was noted that the associations included not just the identifier but the title as well — when that could be seen when the other framework was pulled.
Other than readability I’m not really sure why this was included; when retrieving documents with thousands of associations, this can increase the overall size of the document (especially when many are recursive ‘isChildof’ associations… when there is also sequenceNumber to put those elements in a tree.
3. CFItemType — what is a ‘cluster’ on the math standards and do I need to get those in addition to the regular standards statements?
This was an interesting one to answer. Most standards documents do in fact have elements there are just there to be titles/for navigation; they wouldn’t have content aligned to them directly. This is confusing to computer scientists, who assume every element in a framework has a purpose. But standards documents were written by curriculum folks who wanted to provide structure to the standards documents, so many standards are denoted to be ‘together’, and curriculum/assessment planners will often use the clusters to denote assessment targets etc — but content applied to an entire cluster would be too broad to be useful. See:
So the user/developer may see all of these cluster statements, and teachers would expect to see them too, but I don’t think that specific content aligned to just the cluster would be useful (or if it was, only if it was somehow aligned to both K.CC.B.4 and K.CC.B.5).
CASE specifically does not specify what a ‘CFItemType’ should be within a framework — eg cluster, standard, title, statement etc. This is great for widespreads use, but it seems that “CFItemType” description field may not be filled out all the time or wasn’t visible.
All of this is just my thoughts as I have only been using CASE as a consumer recently, but I do think a primer on “what is a standards framework” is something that might be useful for including in developer guides because K-12 is ‘different’ sometimes and proud of it!
