Stackable Portable Digital Credentials

I've been participating in work groups from several key organizations that are developing standards for digital credentials. The following brief summarizes what's happening in the credentials space, particularly with stackable and digital credentials.

Stackable Portable Digital Credentials in Education and Industry

There is a growing interest in “stackable credentials” as a solution to problems faced by students, higher education institutions, workforce training programs, schools, and employers.  A report by the Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success at CLASP defines credentials to include “degrees; diplomas; credit-bearing, noncredit, and work readiness certificates; badges; professional/ industry certifications; apprenticeships; and licenses—all of which in different ways testify to people’s skills, knowledge, and abilities.”

The U.S. Department of Labor defines a credential as stackable “when it is part of a sequence of credentials that can be accumulated over time and move an individual along a career pathway or up a career ladder.” The same concept might apply to a pre-career sequence of educational achievements such as credentials that qualify a secondary student to enter higher education.

An example “stackable” credential is a job-specific certificate earned in the short-term while counting toward the longer-term goal of a degree. Stackable credentials provide value to both the student and potential employers by showing short-term value  (what can a person can do now) and as a milestone toward a larger educational achievement. This is especially valuable for people who enter the workforce while continuing to pursue a degree. The Department of Labor recommends that higher education and workforce training providers “modularize curricula into smaller portions, or chunks, enhancing the ability of individuals to earn interim credentials and combine part-time study with full-time employment and/or supporting a family.”

Many organizations including the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Education, community colleges, four-year colleges, workforce training programs, and industry groups are investigating how stackable credentials might address problems such as:

·      students giving up before completing high school and college,

·      the overwhelming cost of an all-or-nothing college credential,

·      unemployment persists while employers have trouble filling positions, and

·      training programs having trouble keeping up with changing needs in the global and local economies.

Stackable credentials also include certifications and licenses earned after receiving a degree. For example, medical professionals with multiple specialties may be more likely to be hired because they can fill more than one role (e.g. phlebotomist and EKG technician). Digital Promise is developing a micro-credential system that provides teachers with the opportunity to gain recognition for skills they master throughout their careers.

Portable credentials are credentials that are accepted across institutions, and across domains. One issue of portability has to do with a common understanding of the student competencies that the credential represents. When a student receives a baccalaureate degree in accounting, potential employers expect that the credential means the student has certain skills that qualify her for an entry level position in the accounting field. If the student is earning a credential with the intent of using it to qualify for a job then the competency model used by the issuing institution should be industry recognized.  If a K-12 student is earning a high school diploma with the intent of going on to college, the diploma should be acceptable evidence for the postsecondary institution to know that the student is college ready.

Another issue of portability is the acceptance of the credential in another jurisdiction, for example, if an associate degree or certificate earned at a community college in one state is accepted at a 4-year institution in another state as credit towards a bachelor’s degree.

Digital Credentials

Digital credentials are verifiable electronic records of a person’s achievements or qualifications. Digital credentials take different forms depending on how they are used. Technical implementations include electronic transcripts, digital certificates, and digital badges. For portability, the digital credentials must use widely adopted technical standards for interoperability between issuing and consuming data systems.

Technical Standards for Stackable Credentials

Government agencies, industry groups, standards bodies and education providers are developing approaches to the data collection and use related to stackable credentials. For example:

• The Badge Alliance and related Open Badges Initiative have developed an open standard and free software for digital badges (an image file with embedded metadata representing a personal achievement) that links back to the issuer, criteria and verifying evidence.
• The Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) include standard vocabulary for data used to recognize student achievements linked to evidence.
• Credential Transparency Initiative is creating a credential registry that will allow users to see what various credentials — from college degrees to industry certifications and micro-credentials — represented in terms of competencies, transfer value, assessment rigor, and third-party endorsement.
• IMS Global is working with college registrars on an extended electronic transcript standard that would include record of competencies and non-course activities.
• PESC has formed an Academic Credentialing & Experiential Learning Task Force to build on its previous eTranscript standard
• W3C Credentials Workgroup plans to publish a standard for encoding personal credentials in a way that can be authenticated and verified using technology similar to bitcoin and technologies addressing personal identity and privacy.

Some of the implementation challenges that these organizations are wrestling with include:

·      Should a persons digital credentials from multiple institutions be kept in a “locker” or “backpack” under the stewardship of a third party hosting organization, held privately by the recipient, or exist in a distributed network?

·      What technology should be use to certify the validity of a credential and protect against counterfeit credentials?

·      What method and data standards should be used to standardize the information about what a credential represents?

·      How to digitally link the identity of a person to a credential they have received?

Key terms related to this topic include:

career pathway – a series of achievements and that qualify a person for a career

career latter – a path of achievements that allow a person to move into increasingly more advanced jobs within a single industry or career path

career lattice – a connected sequence of achievements that allow a person to move up in a career pathway or over to a new career using transferable qualifications

digital credential – a verifiable electronic record of a person’s achievement or qualification

portable credential – credentials that are accepted across institutions and/or domains

stackable credential – part of a sequence of credentials that can be accumulated over time

micro-credential – a credential that recognized mastery of a single competency

 

Emerging DIgital Ecosystem for Competency Education (slide from iNACOL Symposium session)

Data Standards for Competency Education

This is a video capture of the slide deck that Liz Glowa, Maria Worthen, and I used in our session "Data Standards for Competency Education" at the STATS-DC conference on July 31, 2014.  (Slides from the one hour presentation compressed into two minutes of video...use pause as needed.)

Open Education Resources (OER) Digital Ecosystem

I recently participated in the "OER Annotation Summit" in Berkley, California.  The event was  supported in large part by an OER technology grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.  The Summit explored opportunities and barriers to fostering greater collaboration in solving shared technology challenges for open education resources initiatives.

At the event I worked with a break-out group to map the OER Digital Ecosystem. The following infographic is the QIP visualization of the "ecosystem" derived from a picture of the whiteboard and Felix Tscheulin's gliffy diagram of the same...

EdFacts Community Video

Here is a video that I produced with QIP and AEM teams...

Technology-Enabled Personalized Learning

Last week I had the privilege of representing QIP at the Technology-Enabled Personalized Learning Summit. The invitation-only event was hosted by the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at NC State University and included the right mix of education practitioners, service providers, nonprofit leaders, researchers, and education technology thought leaders to tackle some of the big questions around the future of personalized learning.

Here are some take-aways:

• Personalized learning is more than differentiated instruction -- it is learner-centered vs. teacher/group-centered mass-customization.
• Personalized learning requires a different set of practices, tools, roles, and resources.
• Research-based evidence about effective personalized learning has not made it into mainstream practice.
• Noncognitive factors, such as grit, tenacity, and perseverance, become important as learners develop habits of success and take on greater autonomy in personalized models.
• Personalized learning uses different data -- metrics for "growth" and "grit" continuously measured for feedback to the learner rather than less frequent measurement of achievement for benchmarking and accountability.
• Technical standards for interoperability of personalized learning data exist, but there are issues preventing scaled adoption/implementation...data integration barriers are slowing down progress toward personalized learning.
• Personalized learning at scale can only work by leveraging technology and "big data" -- privacy concerns must be addressed.
• We can compel students to attend school but we can't compel them to learn...or can we -- the human-centered design of personalized learning must include motivational design.
• "Engagement isn't necessarily enjoyment. If you're drowning, you're engaged in the experienced, but it's not enjoyable" - Chris Dede
• Human to human relationships matter (student-to-student, educator-to-student) 
• Emerging models leverage non-instructional roles and technology to free up teacher time to work more with individuals and smaller groups.
• Personalized learning opens new career pathways for education professionals and opportunities for both traditional schools of education and other organizations to develop/support new professions.  A new set of professional competencies are needed and those competencies need to be defined as new professional roles and delivery models emerge. 
• Personalized competency-based professional learning is important to optimize professional development and as a model for personalized student learning. 
• Personalized learning at scale can benefit by new kinds of collaboration between learning science research and practice. 

Technology-enabled personalized learning calls for human-focused designs and delivery systems that are fundamentally different from traditional classroom models.  Summit participants identified some potential solutions to current barriers and important next steps to make scaled personalized learning a reality.  Stay tuned...

"2-Sigma" Learning at Scale (Part 2): What research tells us.

Under what conditions can MOST STUDENTS learn as effectively as the top 20% of students under the conventional classroom condition?  This 11 minute video explores what research tells us.