Educators increasingly expect academic standards to be available wherever teaching and learning take place. Whether developing lessons, aligning instructional materials, reviewing assessments, or supporting workforce-connected learning pathways, access to accurate and current standards has become an essential part of modern educational technology.

Expanding that access requires collaboration between organizations with different areas of expertise. A recent Microsoft Education blog highlighted one example of this work, bringing together Microsoft, EdGate, and 1EdTech to help broaden access to academic standards and competencies for educators around the world.

While each organization plays a different role, they share the same goal in making standards and competencies easier to access, manage, and use within the tools educators rely on every day.

Three Organizations, One Shared Goal

Microsoft provides educational tools and experiences used by educators around the world. 1EdTech develops interoperability standards that help educational technologies exchange information consistently across systems. EdGate contributes standards expertise, repository management, alignment services, and the data infrastructure needed to organize and maintain standards across diverse frameworks and jurisdictions.

Together, these contributions help create a more connected ecosystem where standards can be accessed, shared, and applied more effectively within educational technology environments.

One result of this collaboration has been the expansion of standards coverage available through Microsoft's education tools. By combining Microsoft's platform capabilities and EdGate's extensive standards repository, educators can access a broader collection of standards and competencies without leaving the tools they already use.

That expanded coverage includes:

• All 50 U.S. states, including Common Core State Standards, NGSS, and state-specific frameworks
• More than 70 countries, with standards spanning core academic subjects, vocational education, and qualification frameworks
• Hundreds of supplemental frameworks covering career and technical education, world languages, fine arts, and other specialized disciplines

This expanded coverage helps support educators, institutions, and content providers working across diverse educational environments while reducing the effort required to locate and apply standards from multiple sources.

Why Interoperability Matters

Educational technology ecosystems are increasingly interconnected. Content providers, learning platforms, assessment systems, credentialing organizations, and workforce development initiatives all rely on accurate standards and competency data.

As standards evolve and new frameworks emerge, organizations need reliable ways to exchange and maintain that information across systems. This is where interoperability becomes essential.

When standards and competency data can move consistently between platforms, organizations spend less time managing custom integrations and more time focusing on the experiences they want to deliver for educators and learners. Educators benefit from having standards available within the tools they already use, while organizations gain greater flexibility in how they develop and deliver content, assessments, and learning experiences.

Extending Standards Beyond Traditional Educational Boundaries

The collaboration highlighted by Microsoft reflects a broader conversation taking place across education and workforce development: how to make standards and competency data more portable, consistent, and useful across systems.

That topic was explored at the recent Learning Impact Conference, where EdGate's Gina Faulk and Kathleen Ideguchi presented a session titled Aligning Competencies Across Education-to-Employment Ecosystems with CASE.

The session examined how the 1EdTech CASE (Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange) standard provides an open, interoperable format for defining, exchanging, and leveraging competencies across educational and workforce systems.

As education and career pathways become increasingly connected, institutions and employers need reliable ways to align learning standards, course catalogs, skills frameworks, credentials, and job requirements. CASE helps address this need by providing a common structure that can be used across learning management systems, student information systems, content repositories, talent platforms, and other technologies.

The discussion also highlighted how CASE can reduce integration barriers, establish a more reliable system of record for standards and competencies, and support consistent data exchange across educational ecosystems. These capabilities are becoming increasingly important as organizations seek to create clearer connections between learning experiences and workforce opportunities.

Building a More Connected Educational Ecosystem

The collaboration between Microsoft, 1EdTech, and EdGate demonstrates what can happen when organizations with complementary strengths work toward a shared goal.

By combining platform innovation, interoperability frameworks, and trusted standards data, it becomes possible to create experiences that make standards more accessible and useful for educators while supporting the broader needs of educational institutions, content providers, and technology developers.

For EdGate, that vision aligns closely with the work we have supported for nearly 30 years. Improving access to educational standards and competencies is not the responsibility of a single organization. It is a shared effort that depends on collaboration, interoperability, and a commitment to helping educators and learners succeed.

As educational technology continues to evolve, partnerships like these will play an increasingly important role in helping standards and competencies move more seamlessly across the systems that support teaching, learning, and workforce readiness.