The significance of all of this startup activity in the educational technology category is not whether any particular venture will succeed or fail but the kaleidoscope of new methodologies that will be discovered, refined, and optimized. Ultimately, the goals of education from the learner’s perspective are to gain an understanding of the progression and meaning of humanity’s greatest insights and to come away with the knowledge and skills for a fulfilling and meaningful life. The potential of education to transform human beings is so great that some people maintain it is a basic human right.
The classic model of higher education whereby students pay huge sums of money to attend lectures given by experts on a sprawling college or university campus is increasingly out of reach for most people. And for many of those who are lucky enough to afford this experience, the enormous burden of repaying their student loans nullifies some of the positive benefits of their learning. The promise of vaporized education, for all its many shortcomings and growing pains, lies in the prospect of more equal, affordable access to theoretical and practical knowledge and the credentials that signal mastery of both.
Credentials are the Final Frontier for Online Learning
Suppose you were to take a series of online courses in order to brush up your skills and learn
something new. If a prospective employer finds your degree credits meaningful, you’ve got a shot at getting a better job. However, if that employer fails to see value in your credentials, then your
investment of time, effort, and money may not help your cause. You might be smarter but poorer.
Establishing credentials is one of the most difficult issues still facing vaporized education.
As we’ve seen, the big MOOC platforms offer proprietary “honor code” credentials and “verified certificates.” P2PU is developing something called “peer accreditation.” So far, however, these online-only credentials don’t solve the signaling problem because employers have no idea how to interpret them. They are too narrowly tied to a single platform, so unless the hiring executive has taken the course herself, she will have no idea what the credit means.
A variety of startups such as Degreed, MyEdu, Accredible, and Smarterer are attempting to solve this problem by aggregating achievements across a number of online learning programs and offering different ways to organize and display credentials uniformly and consistently.
In another approach, Germany’s iversity is offering course-completion certificates for its moocs that are integrated with the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). As Hannes
Klửpper of iversity told me, “ECTS credits are the official currency of the European education
market.” So the fact that students of iversity’s online education can earn ECTS credits means they can fully integrate into the traditional system of higher education. In fact, a major advantage of the ECTS is that students can earn credits for course work at any participating university and make them count towards their degree at their home university. And by cooperating with accredited colleges and
universities, iversity greatly enhances the value of online learning in the eyes of employers. However, this strategy may limit iversity’s ability to innovate beyond the standard fare of major European
universities if the bureaucratic accreditation councils of their not-so-nimble partners can’t keep up.
In the US, none of the universities that publish free courseware on edX or Coursera are willing to grant an online degree equivalent to their on-campus programs. So far, only Udacity and the Georgia Institute of Technology (in partnership with AT&T) have worked out a way to offer a traditional degree to online students. When they announced an online master’s degree in computer science in 2013 it made news as the first time that a real-world university was willing to confer a traditional degree to online students who pay only $7,000, or about one-sixth the price of the degree earned on campus.
Why haven’t the others followed Georgia Tech’s example? Simple. If cheap online diplomas gain currency, demand for the pricier on-campus program could erode. Brick-and-mortar universities and colleges may be forced to match the discounted Internet price at a time when they are struggling to amortize huge investments in new buildings and country-club amenities. By withholding their
credentials from online learning, these institutions hope to preserve the premium pricing for their core product.
Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech, sees the future differently: “I thought we could be leaders in this revolution by taking it to the next level, by doing the revolutionary step,” he told the online newsfeed Inside Higher Ed. Galil expects to scale enrollment from 300 on-campus students to 10,000 online. Galil understands that the winner-take-all dynamic means the advantage accrues to the first mover.
At best, the concepts for online credentials described above merely match what is available at any
college or university. To beat the signaling strength of a college diploma, a further revolutionary step may be necessary. Internet courseware needs a new system that is limber and global, defined as an open technical standard so that certification is consistent across every online academy and college around the world. Meeting this demand will require a standardized approach to credentials and a way to track the accomplishments of every learner, regardless of their nation of origin or their
socioeconomic background or their local education system. Think of it as a digital ECTS for all online courses.
Say hello to “micro-credentials”
Open Badges may be just the solution. This is the open-source certification scheme developed especially for online education by the Mozilla Foundation, and it offers several features that distinguish it from previous standards:
> The badges are not just static images or cute graphics. Encoded in them are metadata such as the name of the course, the nature of the lessons, the specific test or assessment that was used to grade the student’s progress, a link to a gallery of deliverables and, most importantly, the name of the issuer.
> The badges are designed to plug into the reputation graph—they can be posted easily on
LinkedIn, for example—but they are not transferable. The badges belong only to the person who earns them.
> The badges can be used as a pivot point to find other people with similar achievements.
> The badges enable a diverse range of options for flexible course design, such as a long course or short, single lesson or series, solo or group, and so on.
> The credits can be permanent or they can be set to expire after a certain date. They can even be remotely renewed by the publisher.
> The badges can be control points for a game-like achievement system: for example, a student might only be able to open up the next level of the course if she has earned the badge for the previous level.
> Meta-badges can be used to organize a group of classes under a single badge, to signal mastery of a coherent body of information.
> The badges can be used to combine unique groups of courses from a variety of providers to create personalized degree programs.
> The badges can be issued by any organization or individual: a college, a MOOC, a charity, a corporation, a government agency, a military division, a public safety department, or an author, expert, or individual teacher. Even a weekend hackathon for app developers can issue badges to those who complete a software project.
> The badges are not bound to the classroom. They can be used to recognize any achievement:
sports records, volunteer activity, charitable works, tutoring hours, community service, performing arts skills, or completed travel.
Any organization—not just a college or university—can issue a “micro-credential.” For instance, Autodesk, the maker of three-dimensional technology software, could issue micro-credentials to people who are qualified to teach computer-aided design (CAD) courses online. Adobe might issue
micro-credentials through online courses that teach Photoshop or Illustrator at various levels of advancement.
About 14,000 badge issuers have joined the Open Badges program so far, including major educational publishers like Pearson, government entities like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Smithsonian Institution, and corporations like Intel. And, of course, universities such as Purdue and Carnegie Mellon have also signed up.
The advantages of a standardized, software-defined, machine-readable credential are significant.
In the future, students will post open badges on a personal website or LinkedIn profile instead of requesting college transcripts. Recruiters and prospective employers will be able to index these smart resumes automatically, keeping track of updates to the badge collection and contacting those with the appropriate credentials when a job comes up.
One major advantage of the open badges and smart resume is that they help to automate the process of matching workers to jobs. Once the credentials are standardized, this process can happen on a massive scale. Did you master a new sales training program? Check. Did you get promoted to sales account manager? Check. Did you make it into the President’s Club for closing $5 million in new contracts? Check. All of these badges, issued by independent parties, will appear on the smart resume where they will be noted by prospective employers. It’s easy to imagine that a “recruiter bot”
employed by a corporate human resources department will constantly scour the Web for prospective candidates. When the bot discovers a candidate with a suitable collection of badges, the recruiter may reach out directly to the candidate. Instead of searching for a job, the jobs will search for candidates automatically.
Open Badges present the possibility of displacing the university’s last line of defense: the diploma.
Instead of a single document that signals four years’ worth of accomplishments with very little detail or a transcript that offers nothing more than the name of a class and a grade, smart badges will enable prospective employers to drill deeper to review the coursework, the test scores, and the entire
portfolio of completed assignments.
“The game in academia is that a governing body validates a university’s programs and the business community acknowledges and accepts their judgment because they don’t want to be bothered,”
explained Chris Boardman, a professor in professional practice at the University of Miami. “Over time I believe that Open Badges with bots that search out expertise looks like a viable alternative that can meet demand. The question is: ‘Who determines the quality of the skill sets acquired?’”
In the future, employers, not academicians, will make that determination. Today universities are accredited by government bodies whose authority is backed up by public funding. By definition, such accreditation boards are detached from the labor marketplace. That situation is ripe for change. In a 2013 speech at the Presidents’ Forum, which comprises leaders from a group of accredited national educational institutions, Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen drew a distinction between government-appointed accreditors and employers as the arbiter of online learning’s value. He said,
“Where the employer is truly the ultimate consumer of the graduates in training, employers—not accreditors—are the only ones who need to be persuaded.”
My expectation is that companies will step up to a more active role in determining the merit of digital credentials. Some companies have already begun to issue their own badges that conform to their criteria. And, of course, they will also accept credentials issued by third parties. However, with Open Badges the employers will be able to specify more precisely the skill sets and level of
expertise they seek. I believe this is likely to happen because, ultimately, companies face the hard problem of finding the best talent possible. As maddening and frustrating as job seekers may find the labor market, it’s even more difficult for employers to find the best candidates for their jobs. The current job market is almost certainly the least efficient, most chaotic, and inconsistent marketplace of all. The hardest problems always present the biggest opportunities. A software-defined marketplace for human talent could be the biggest opportunity in the Vaporized Economy.
ASK YOURSELF
> How does your company currently find candidates for open positions? How effective is that approach? Do you feel that your company is fully aware of all possible candidates? How might machine-readable credentials like Open Badges improve the recruiting process?
> Consider yourself as a candidate for a job. What method(s) would you use today to inform prospective employers about your skill set, experience, and achievements? How might machine- readable credentials improve your ability to connect with prospective employers?
> How do you keep your skills up to date? What tools are available to help you record and post your extracurricular pursuits, non-degree learning, professional development, and personal accomplishments? How might these tools be improved?
> Does your company or organization embrace and maximize digital alternatives? Or does it neutralize or weaken them by withholding a key component of value the way universities
withhold credentials from MOOCs? Which approach is more likely to prepare your organization to contend with a vaporized future?
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