IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces CASE Network Collaboration and No-Cost Access to Authenticated Official State Standards
Trusted Source of Academic Standards in Digital Format Will Transform How States and Districts Adopt Digital Curriculum and Assessments to Meet Learning Goals
LAKE MARY, Florida, 21 May 2019 — IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global/IMS), the world-leading non-profit collaborative advancing edtech interoperability, innovation, and learning impact announced today CASE® Network, a significant step forward for states, districts, and educational technology suppliers in enabling better accuracy, transparency, and access to state learning standards and emerging competency frameworks.
CASE Network is a no-cost, authoring and distribution service, and extensible online repository, for official identifiers issued by standards authors in digital format using the IMS Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange® (CASE) standard. By providing this service, anyone can access official academic standards verified by the authoring agency in one trusted source. CASE Network will make it dramatically easier for institutions, state education agencies to support aligned instruction.
"CASE Network brings together state education agencies, institutions, and product suppliers—all with a valid stake in ensuring better learning outcomes—to enable a trusted ecosystem that supports aligned instruction and educational improvement," said Dr. Rob Abel, chief executive officer, IMS Global Learning Consortium. "This service fills a critical void in K-12 education with identifying official learning standards from different authors and tracking the associations, changes, and updates to those standards over time."
The newest release of the CASE Network registry includes a verified set of mathematics and English Language Arts standards for all 50 states plus the Common Core. Where states like Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas establish a CASE certified service, CASE Network will mirror those standards and updates verbatim.
The benefits of CASE Network are free for anyone. Individual standards can be viewed and linked to from the public registry by anyone at any time. IMS provides a no-cost registration for standards authors and suppliers for accessing more advanced features of CASE Network and offers powerful tools for authoring and distributing official standards in the CASE format.
IMS Contributing Members will receive reports on changes in the CASE Network registry of standards and can get certified as a CASE Network provider or issuer. A new CASE Network Alliance has been created as a cost-effective way to achieve IMS CASE certification to ensure suppliers start and end with official standards.
The next phase of the collaboration will expand the footprint for CASE Network adding workforce competencies and higher education frameworks that will make it easier to align instruction from kindergarten to career.
CASE Network is possible because of the generous sponsorship provided by IMS members ACT, McGraw-Hill, and SchoolCity powered by Illuminate Education.
Today, May 21, at the IMS Learning Impact Leadership Institute in San Diego California, the Georgia and South Carolina Departments of Education, and the Montana Office of Public Instruction will present, "Unleash the Power of Standards through CASE Network." The South Carolina Department of Education will also lead a featured session on, "How Can Districts Make CASE Work in My State," with LearningMate. On Thursday, May 23, Katy ISD, Houston ISD, and Itslearning will discuss how school districts convinced Texas to leverage CASE in, "SEA + 15 LEAs Collaborating = Entire State Wins."
"Montana is pleased to join the growing number of State Education Agencies who are providing transparent and official access to state standards through the CASE Network. The CASE Network registry allows us to have confidence that Montana's standards can be incorporated into student information systems, curriculum alignment tools, and other applications with fidelity to the standards as they were adopted by the Montana Board of Public Education. Our state is poised to move forward with transformational learning opportunities—CASE is part of the infrastructure that will help our districts to move forward with personalized learning that will transform student success in our state."
—Colet Bartow, Director, Content Standards and Instruction, Montana Office of Public Instruction
"Gwinnett County Public Schools' curriculum is called the Academic Knowledge and Skills (AKS) and is aligned to the state-adopted Georgia Standards of Excellence. The CASE Network and registry will allow us to take digital resources that are aligned to a set of standards in the CASE Network and quickly align the resources to the AKS. This will dramatically reduce the timeframe from acquiring digital resources and making them available to teachers and students with alignment to the AKS. CASE Network will also assist our annual AKS review and change process as a subset of the standards are reviewed for changes and updates each year. Gwinnett looks forward to continued participation in shaping the CASE Network through the work of IMS Global and other member institutions."
—Mark A. Walls, Executive Director, Information Systems and Solutions, Gwinnett County Public Schools
"CASE Network is a huge step forward for K-12 interoperability efforts to enable equitable access to learning resources. For ACT, CASE Network will support us in our mission to help people achieve education and workforce success. In particular, the ACT Holistic Framework™—now represented in CASE—is more accessible to serve as a guidepost for defining an individual's preparation and success beyond academics to include factors that encompass college and career readiness and easier to cross reference against other frameworks."
—Marten Roorda, Chief Executive Officer, ACT
"SchoolCity, powered by Illuminate, is a proud sponsor of the CASE Network. As one of the most open and interoperable education technology companies in the space, Illuminate greatly values IMS Global's commitment to free, accessible educational standards that will help improve application integrations. This will inevitably empower districts and teachers to seamlessly utilize the tools that best suit their needs for actionable data and analytics."
—Jeremy Lupoli, Ph.D., Vice President, Technical Integration Strategy, Illuminate Education
"Despite improvements in technology that have helped make classroom learning both easier and more analytically robust, entering curriculum standards information from pdfs or websites into those technologies can be a time-consuming task for teachers. The IMS CASE Network, built with support from D2L's Achievement Standards Network™ (ASN), will provide a master record for machine-readable curriculum standards, smoothing the process for better integration into learning technology."
—Jeremy Auger, Chief Strategy Officer, D2L
For more information on CASE Network go to imsglobal.org/casenetwork.
About IMS Global Learning Consortium
IMS Global is a non-profit organization that advances technology to scale and improve educational participation and attainment affordably. IMS Global members are leading suppliers, institutions, and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS Global sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute; a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas to help shape the future of educational technology.
Initiative:
Digital Credentials and Lifelong Learning
Technical Activity:
Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange