JES & Co. collaborated with professor Stuart Sutton at the Information School, University of Washington, and created the ASN through NSF awards DUE-0121717 and 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.
The ASN is an open specification for representing educational expectations. It provides:
The ASN includes resolution services and web services that enable machine-readable access and network distribution of standards data. Standards from the US, Australia, and other countries are available free of charge.
No. The ASN is designed for interoperability and open access across countries, languages, educational sectors, industries, and jurisdictional levels.
Yes. Each standards document and atomized statement is assigned a globally unique, HTTP-based URI.
These URIs act as GUIDs within consuming systems and can be resolved over the Web to retrieve machine-readable text and rich metadata.
Example: http://asn.desire2learn.com/resources/S21500617
ASN URIs are open, non-restrictive, and reusable across systems such as LMSs, digital libraries, and publishers’ platforms.
Yes. Publisher-derived refinements conforming to the ASN data model behave exactly like original statements.
Parsing the URI returns the refined statement along with its parent assertion and associated metadata, allowing consuming systems to display or process the data as needed.
The ASN can accommodate any type of standards document (higher education, AP, certifications, non-US, adult learning, etc.).
If you’d like to see a standards set included, contact us.
Detailed technical documentation is available at: Technical Documentation