ASN FAQs

The Achievement Standards Network is a JES & Co. program. JES & Co., a publicly funded 501c3 education research organization, is a leader in research and deployment of open standards. With over 15 years of experience in interoperability and portability of educational resources, organizations around the world come to JES & Co. to make things happen. Since its establishment in the early 1990s, JES & Co. has led and managed The Achievement Standards Network (ASN), The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, The Gateway to 21st Century Skills (formerly known as GEM), the Dell Academy, the Intel Student Certification Program, and Microsoft’s Partners in Learning. Thousands of organizations worldwide use technical standards developed and refined by JES & Co. efforts which are subsequently made publicly available through open source initiatives. The lead technical scientist of the ASN project is Stuart Sutton from the Information School at the University of Washington. Data services are managed by JES & Co.'s Joseph Chapman. Project out reach is provided by Diny Golder, Executive Director of JES & Co.

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 ASN Web Services and resolution services.

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. We are publicly funded to make various countries’ (including the US) published standards available for any public or private sector use including library systems, learning management systems, publishers’ sites, portals, and research.

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://purl.org/ASN/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 at http://standards.jesandco.org/wiki/ASN_Application_Profile. 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.

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.

For a reasonable fee we can accommodate any type of standards document (Higher Ed, AP, technical certification, adult learning, non-US, etc.). The funding of a standards entry benefits all the users of the ASN and helps the repository expand.

Detailed documentation can be found here: http://asn.jesandco.org/content/technical-documentation

The Achievement Standards Network community includes all of its stakeholders. There are several ways to contribute. You can be a user of the ASN data, which is free to use in any manner reasonably likely under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can also be a contributor. All of the data in the ASN has come by way of public support with the goal of maintaining a free and open standard framework and an open respository of learning objectives. Please keep in mind that JES & Co. is a 501c3 non-profit organization and any contributions to the ASN are tax deductible.