Giving Compass' Take:

• Getting Smart reports on a recent conference where IMS Global Learning Consortium announced the Competency and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) Registry: Basically, this will help more people access to digital learning tools.

• How can those in the education field use these resources to their advantage? There are a lot of tech buzzwords in this piece, but know that ease of use and standards that many content providers can adopt is good for the industry as a whole.

• Here are the most influential people in EdTech for 2018.

Plumbing — you don’t think about it, but can’t imagine life without it. In education, data is now the plumbing and IMS Global Learning Consortium is the leading standards-setting body.

This week, IMS hosted the Global Learning Impact Leadership Institute in Baltimore.

At the conference, IMS announced the Competency and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) Registry, a free resource that will allow content providers to align with standards from all 50 state standards.

“Georgia is proud to be the first state to fully adopt the CASE standard,” said state Superintendent Richard Woods (see our December podcast with Deputy Superintendent Caitlin McMunn Dooley, where she discusses CASE as a core component of their data architecture).

The Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard made it easier to access digital learning resources, apps, and tools within any platform. LTI (now v1.3) has been incorporated into more than 70 learning platforms and hundreds of learning apps.

LTI Advantage is a package of extensions built on LTI to add new features, including names and role-provisioning services, deep linking, and assignment and grade services. IMS Executive Director Rob Abel said HigherEd leaders were excited about LTI Advantage.

Read the full article about how IMS is leading on interoperability and credentialing by Tom Vander Ark at Getting Smart.