Why do “Machine Readable” Academic Standards Matter? (Part 1)

There are too many standards to cover in a year. Utilizing machine-readable standards to customize the standards a student sees in a year can help.

Standards are often portrayed as being as useful for educational equity as a microwave on a desert island. With a botched nationwide implementation of Common Core, as districts shift to increasingly localized curriculum and standards we have an urgent opportunity to implement better standards based on existing documents with equity and educational excellence in mind.

The Common Core State Standards were supposed to help solve the problem of “mile wide, inch deep” but even as those standards have splintered into sometimes unrecognizable variants, most of the core content is the same or even further diluted.

However, if there’s anything COVID and distance learning has taught educators, it’s that teaching online requires different skills and ways of organizing content for students than before. The way to do that is to use openly available machine readable standards to tag all learning content for maximum accuracy and localized needs. Something we call “Derivative Frameworks”.

What does it mean to have a standard in machine readable form?

Having both the primary curricular standards and their corresponding finer-grained skills (or “unpackings”) in digital form allows for more specific learning resources, feedback and assessment of those skills. What I mean is — it’s fine for most teachers to call the standard by it’s code — HSG.C.A.1 for example (Prove that all circles are similar), but it needs a machine-readable code called a UUID as well. On the IMS Global CASE network in the Common Core Standards framework, that UUID is 6b9c6a73-d7cc-11e8–824f-0242ac160002 . What makes that important is even if the same code of HSG.C.A.1 exists in other states, the UUID ensures systems are only talking about the ‘original one in the CCSS framework. The others may have kept the code but slightly changed the wording for example, but most importantly they’re part of a states own standards now. Thus without a machine readable identifier, you can’t code content, activities and more online without potentially getting really confused quickly as well as not being 100% sure what state would want to see which content. This blog talks a lot about the IMS specification CASE — CASE is the template for how machine-readable competency/standard frameworks are exchanged — it basically just sets the fields that are shared between systems. “Identifiers (UUID), Human Coding Scheme (egg HSG.C.A.1), and “Full Statement” (standard itself) are all part of the fields that get exchanged. In fact, most state-published standards are missing out on adding additional detail to their published standards because they publish in PDF’s instead of natively on the web.

Crosswalks

If you have content published to a Common Core Standard that didn’t change meaning when it came to your state, a crosswalk is a document that makes connections between standards. Thus if you find a video that proves all circles are similar, a crosswalk search for “HSG.C.A.1” in your LMS could automatically convert that to the Arizona standard G.G-C.A.1 because a crosswalk between the CCSS (6b9c6a73-d7cc-11e8–824f-0242ac160002) and Arizona (6cca9cf3-d7cc-11e8–824f-0242ac160002) UUID’s was made and is processed in the background. In a Derivative Framework, to start one would make an ‘exact’ link between the localized standard and it’s State standard.

Conclusion

In part 2, we’ll talk more specifically about the technology and rationale behind why Derivative Frameworks help improve student achievement and thus increase equity for all students in the age of remote learning.