Courses and Careers

New CASE 1.1 Standard Empowers Educators

Burlington, MA (USA), April 2025 — Educators, educational institutions and educational technology and service providers can draw clearer and more effective connections between learning resources, courses, educational institutions and employers when leveraging the latest Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) 1.1 standard from 1EdTech® Consortium.

CASE 1.1 is the standard and trusted way to publish and exchange learning standards, academic competencies and skills frameworks in a digital format that learning platforms and tools can use to tag resources, grades, reporting and credentials to an organization’s official academic standards, competencies and skills.

CASE 1.1 has been updated to give schools, colleges, and other organizations more options when leveraging the standard. The update allows them to include extra information needed to clarify outcomes, connect learning standards, competencies and skills in different languages, link to other systems for things like credentials, and add new types of frameworks—starting with course codes—so they can share course information more easily in digital tools.

"CASE 1.1 is a breakthrough for digital learning ecosystems across K-12, higher education, and workforce development," said Curtiss Barnes, CEO of 1EdTech Consortium. "It supports dynamic curriculum mapping and alignment of courses, learning outcomes, and assignments to competencies and standards—regardless of the underlying course catalogcatalogue or curriculum management system. By making this information machine-readable and interoperable, CASE 1.1 creates a connected foundation for initiatives like digital credentials, microcredentials, and comprehensive learner records. It ensures that learners’ achievements can be clearly understood, aligned, and valued across institutions and employers alike."

CASE can help educational institutions from K-12, primary, secondary, postsecondary and higher education:

  • Align course content, learning resources and assessments to academic standards;
  • Search for digital resources aligned to specific academic standards in their LMS, LOR, or learning resource provider;
  • Offer resources in multiple formats that are aligned to specific academic standards and competencies for more personalized learning;
  • Track learner engagement and outcomes with the aligned resources to determine both resource and course effectiveness.
  • Reduce the work of updating competencies, skills, and academic standards on PDF and spreadsheets, by creating a digital version that is both human and machine-readable.
  • Tag digital credentials back to the official framework of competencies and skills that the learner’s achievement aligns to, providing more meaning and value to the credential when shared outside of the issuing organization.

"CASE helps us marry the practicalities of the classroom with the efficiency of technology," said Keith Osburn, Chief Information Officer and Deputy Superintendent for Technology Services at the Georgia Department of Education. "Being able to make direct connections between our courses, academic standards and edtech tools gives us valuable insights into students’ progress, what lessons and tools are most effective, and how our standards are being taught in classrooms, allowing us to make data-informed decisions moving forward."

"Putting our state academic standards in the CASE format allows our teachers to easily search for resources and tools that directly connect to those standards through the Arizona Digital Educators Library (ADEL)," said Eric Stuebner, program manager for the Arizona Department of Education. "This saves the teachers time as they build their lesson plans, and find new resources to meet individual student needs."

"The goal of CASE is to allow agencies to publish standardized digital representations of learning standards and other competencies, through an ecosystem that allows each agency to retain full control over the source of truth of their data while providing free access for anyone who needs it," said Pepper Williams, President of Common Good Learning Tools and chair of the CASE Working Group. "The new 1.1 version of the CASE spec provides important extensions to the CASE data model, and Common Good’s partner agencies can’t wait to take advantage of these extensions to provide additional types of metadata to CASE-consuming systems."