Key Takeaways:
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Linking courses and skills to credentials helps employers and institutions understand what learners know and can do.
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1EdTech’s Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) standard helps institutions compare learning across K–12 and college courses to evaluate credit and transfer opportunities.
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Institutions can start by bringing teams and partners together to connect one credential or map one learning pathway.
Colleges and universities can help learners take their next steps by making it easier to understand how their courses and skills count toward a credential, further study, or a career. Clear connections can help a high school student bring career and technical education learning into college, a transfer student receive credit for previous coursework, or a graduate show employers what they know and can do.
Giving course lists, learning goals, and skills a common digital format makes this information easier to share and compare. Institutions can connect information that often sits in separate documents, spreadsheets, and systems while reducing repeated data entry and keeping it consistent as requirements change.
1EdTech’s Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange® (CASE®) standard supports this work. It gives compatible systems a shared way to exchange frameworks of courses, competencies, and skills and describe relationships among them.
Connect courses and skills to credentials
A credential becomes more useful when people can understand the learning behind it. Institutions can organize course lists and skills in CASE format, then link that information to digital credentials.
For example, a college could connect a certificate to its required courses and the skills those courses address. When a learner earns the credential, those connections can help employers and other institutions understand what it represents.
This also helps institutions show learners how individual courses contribute to a larger qualification and how the skills they develop relate to workplace needs.
Support credit pathways between institutions
Students benefit when institutions can clearly compare what different courses teach. A common format for course information and learning outcomes can support articulation agreements that define how learning at one institution counts at another.
For example, a college and a school district could map the skills taught in high school career and technical education (CTE) courses to the expectations of related college courses. Faculty could review those connections to identify overlap, gaps, and opportunities for students to earn college credit.
Universities can take a similar approach when reviewing transfer pathways. Comparing course outcomes gives faculty and registrars more information than course titles alone and helps them document agreed relationships between courses.
CASE can make these mappings easier to share and maintain. Institutions still decide which courses are equivalent and what credit to award.
Make achievements useful beyond campus
These connections help learners explain their achievements as they move between education and work. A digital credential linked to clearly defined courses and skills gives the next institution or employer more context for understanding the learning it represents.
The CASE Global Ecosystem initiative aims to extend this work by helping organizations share and connect frameworks across education and workforce systems. Its goal is to make learning and skills easier to understand and use across institutions, industries, and borders.
Start with one pathway
Choose a practical goal: connect a certificate to its courses and skills, map a high school CTE pathway to college coursework, or review a transfer pathway with another university.
Bring faculty, registrars, credentialing staff, technology teams, and relevant education or workforce partners together. Identify the course list or skills framework to use, agree on the relationships to document, and decide who will maintain them. Ask providers how their tools support CASE and whether their products are 1EdTech CASE certified.
1EdTech Contributing Members can also join the “CASE Best Practices for Global Higher Ed and Workforce Project Group” to help develop implementation guidance. For more information, contact support@1edtech.org.
By making courses and skills easier to share and understand, institutions can help learners build on what they have already achieved and see a clearer path forward.
About the Author
Susan Haught is the Director of Program Management on the 1EdTech Product Team. She collaborates with educational institutions and tech providers worldwide while leading the development of innovative standards across the product portfolio, creating strategies and solutions that advance equity, privacy, security, and data interoperability. She has academic and technical professional experience working in K12 and higher education, with a focus on education technology leadership, IT project management, professional learning, academic support programs, and classroom teaching.
Susan’s background includes professional experience in educational technology leadership, encompassing classroom instruction, IT leadership (K-12), student support services (Higher Ed), and technology and operations (K-12 and Higher Ed). Susan has managed the implementation of 1EdTech standards for the fourth-largest school district in the US, led enterprise SaaS and hardware implementations, and the implementation and operations of a new school.
She holds an M.Ed. in Education Technology Leadership from Lamar University.
