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ASN FAQs

  1. Who created the Achievement Standards Network (ASN)?
  2. What exactly is the Achievement Standards Network (ASN)?
  3. Is the ASN only for US K-12 use?
  4. Does the ASN use GUIDs to represent standards statements?
  5. If a publisher has the need to break a statement into smaller statements that are more granular than the original statement, can the ASN data handle that?
  6. What if there is a standards document I want that is not currently offered in the ASN repository?
  7. Where can we learn more about the ASN and its data model?

  1. Who created the Achievement Standards Network (ASN)?
  2. JES & Co. collaborated with professor Stuart Sutton at the Information School, University of Washingon, and created the ASN through NSF awards DUE-0121717, DUE-0840740. The ASN provides access to machine-readable representations of learning objectives published by education agencies and organizations. In 2012, the ASN received subsequent support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    As of February 2014, the ASN is owned and operated by D2L Corporation.

  3. What exactly is the Achievement Standards Network (ASN)?
  4. The ASN is an open specification for the representation of educational expectations. The ASN specification provides for: (1) the text of an educational expectation; (2) rich metadata describing that expectation and its context; and (3) a description of relationships between the expectation being described and other related expectations. The ASN specification provides both a resolution service that returns machine readable text and associated metadata and Web Services that ease the network distribution of the achievement standards data. For the US, Australia and several other countries, standards are housed and made available free of charge through the ASN and its resolution services.

  5. Is the ASN only for US K-12 use?
  6. First, and foremost, the ASN is a specification designed for interoperability and open access to learning objectives. Its specification is capable of representing achievement standards across countries, jurisdictional subdivisions within countries, languages, educational sectors and industries.

  7. Does the ASN use GUIDs to represent standards statements?
  8. According to the ASN specification, each achievement standards document in the ASN and each component assertion atomized from those documents are assigned a globally unique, HTTP-based URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). These URI act as a GUID within a consuming system and also provide that system with the means of relating a standards document or an individual assertion to resources within that system and outside it on the open Web. ASN URIs (such as http://asn.jesandco.org/resources/S1024B7C) can be resolved over the Internet interactively and do not require the system using the URI to house any data. For example, if you take the URI above along with a file extension (.xml) and paste it into your browser, it will return in machine readable format the curriculum standard, its relationship to, and text of, its parent assertion and rich metadata about the curriculum standard (such as grade, subject, originating document, and the agency responsible for the assertion, among other descriptive metadata). A complete list of ASN metadata elements can be found on the ASN Application Profile wiki page. The use of ASN URI's to represent educational expectations does not require any restrictive licensing for the publisher, the consuming system (LMSs and digital libraries, for example) or the end user. Therefore the ASN URI is truly open source data with truly globally unique identifiers (GUID). So, if a publisher uses an ASN URI in its metadata describing an educational resource, the consuming application can parse and display as much of the metadata as it wants. The ASN correlation URI lives freely inside and outside of educational systems and can be re-purposed for anyone's use.

  9. If a publisher has the need to break a statement into smaller statements that are more granular than the original statement, can the ASN data handle that?
  10. As long as the consuming system can parse ASN data, that system can handle a publisher-derived statement based on the ASN specification. The parsing of the URI would return the publisher’s refined assertion along with that refinement’s parent assertion and all of its associated metadata. Data conforming to the ASN data model always looks and acts the same way. As a result, a publisher can present the correlation point with the resolvable URI and the consuming systems can parse it however they want. Once the consuming application decides which elements it wants to display, all ASN URIs will work in the system, regardless of the promulgating agency. What gets displayed is up to the consuming application--e.g., digital libraries often display more metadata than learning management system and publishers' sites may display the ASN data differently than they do within the Common Cartridge. But, the correlation data is exactly the same: an ASN URI.

  11. What if there is a standards document I want that is not currently offered in the ASN repository?
  12. We can accommodate any type of standards document (Higher Ed, AP, technical certification, adult learning, non-US, etc.). If you'd like to see a set of standards included in the ASN, contact us.

  13. Where can we learn more about the ASN and its data model?
  14. Detailed documentation can be found here: http://asn.desire2learn.com/content/technical-documentation

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