IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces
Free 50-State Digital K-12 Academic Standards Registry
The IMS CASE Registry Will Make it Easier for Digital Learning Products to Align to State Learning Standards and Other Competency Frameworks
LAKE MARY, Florida, 21 May 2018 — IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global/IMS), the world-leading non-profit collaborative advancing educational technology innovation, impact, and interoperability announced a new collaboration among IMS member organizations to launch a free digital registry of state K-12 academic standards. The IMS CASE® Registry will be based on the new Competency and Academic Standards Exchange® (CASE) open standard from IMS Global. The registry is expected to be fully operational September 2018, and will include standards for all 50 U.S. states.
“IMS member school districts, states and suppliers have asked IMS to help solve one of the key challenges holding back adoption of digital materials, namely the need to be able to easily align all digital materials, regardless of source, to a publicly available digital representation of state standards,” said Dr. Rob Abel, IMS Global’s Chief Executive Officer. “The first step was to establish the CASE standard to enable interoperable learning standards and competencies. Now IMS is taking the next step to set up and sustain a freely available public registry.”
Several state educational agencies (SEAs) are already moving to support the CASE standard and IMS will work with SEAs to mirror official versions of state standards. The IMS CASE Registry will be based on the OpenSALT open source software project. The CASE standard supports a wide range of academic standards, competency frameworks, rubrics and crosswalks between standards. The Registry will become a source for a wide range of IMS certified CASE products provided by the IMS members directly to the market. IMS has made plans to support the CASE Registry for the foreseeable future.
The development of the CASE Registry is being funded through the support of IMS Global Learning Consortium and a set of sponsoring organizations that include suppliers, states, and non-profit educational foundations. For further information on sponsorship send email to CASE@imsglobal.org.
“Georgia is proud to be the first state to fully adopt the CASE standard and see the implementation of Georgia’s Standards of Excellence in a machine-readable format,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods said. “We see this not just as the adoption of a technical standard, but as a mechanism to help us realize one of our strategic initiatives—the move toward personalized learning for every Georgia student.”
—Georgia State School Superintendent, Richard Woods
"Houston ISD is very proud to have participated in the earliest pilot implementation of IMS Global's Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange standard. Working with our partners, we demonstrated the ability to align the Texas Essential Skills and Knowledge (TEKS) to the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) making it possible to provide the STAAR Curriculum Guides to educators. Now the new CASE standards align with the Texas Educational Agency’s Proclamation 2020, which requires machine-readable learning standards to be employed for curriculum resources up for adoption. HISD is now ramping up to the next step—challenging our partners to incorporate CASE-formatted learning standards for all curriculum resources. Doing so will automate our processes for personalizing learning through data collection, auto-recommending learning content, and precipitating new learning connections for our teachers and students." —E. Anne Boothe, Ed.D. IT Manager, Educational Technology, Houston ISD
“The use of technology and technology-based applications in the classroom continues to grow increasing the need and importance of interoperability related standards and solutions. The IMS CASE standard and registry solution will help to fill a critical gap in the education technology ecosystem.” —Brent Engelman, Director of Education Data & Information Systems, CCSSO.
“The ability to communicate between systems about learning standards using a definitive set of machine-readable statements, and just as importantly, using a definitive and freely-available set of global identifiers, has long been a dream for SchoolCity, our K-12 District partners, and our vendor partners. The CASE standard made this dream conceivable, but without the IMS CASE Registry, it's likely that we all would have waited years for the dream to be realized. Now we're looking forward to starting to use the IMS CASE Registry with our partners in a matter of months! The era of personalized learning just got a shot in the arm.” —Vaseem Anjum, President & CEO, SchoolCity
“The creation and maintenance of the CASE Registry for standards, crosswalks and frameworks—like ACT’s free Holistic Framework™—is essential to create an ecosystem where all digital learning tools and modules can work together seamlessly improving educational outcomes for all students.” —Marten Roorda, CEO, ACT
“McGraw-Hill is pleased to be part of this community and to work together to bring the CASE Registry to life. Reliable and open, machine-readable standards, are a key ingredient for a powerful digital learning ecosystem. We are grateful to IMS’s leadership in this area and know that as a community of educators we will benefit from this core service.” –Stephen Laster, Chief Digital Officer, McGraw-Hill Education
IMS Global Learning Consortium open standards are developed and managed via a partnership among over 450 of the world’s leading educational technology suppliers, school districts, higher education institutions, and states. IMS Global’s 60 plus school district and state members serve approximately 11 million students. IMS state and state consortium members represent 44 U.S. states. IMS higher education institutional members represent 109 universities serving approximately 4.5 million students worldwide.