As someone who tracks the recognition of learning and achievement using Open Badges, I found Learning to be Employable, a report from UK’s City & Guilds a very interesting read, despite its narrow focus on Further Education (FE). Although this report focused on youth in vocational programs, there was lots here that can be adapted to other groups along the spectrum of lifelong learning.
I’m becoming more and more interested in how Open Badges can provide evidence of employability soft skills. I last wrote a blog post on this back in June 2016 and plan to write more on the topic. This post is a further instalment in what I hope will be a series, but is also doing double duty as a submission for the City & Guilds Employability Practitioner CPD ENGAGE Open Badge – eating my own dog food… yum!

Jill Dawson CC 2.0 BY

First Part: What Are Employability Skills and Which Are Most Important?

I  found this section (actually two sections) the most difficult. I guess I was expecting a simplification of an area I’ve found difficult to pin down (I sometimes call soft skills “slippery skills”, because getting them to line up nicely is like trying to nail jello to a wall.)
Instead, I was treated to a historical survey and research summary that emphasized  overlaps between terms. I found the definitions interesting, but still had difficulty parsing terms such as perseverance and resilience (NB: “Resilient” capability  on page 33 includes “perseveres” and ‘displays grit” – ack!) and the authors’ constructs of “habits of mind” and “transferable skills”. As more of a “lumper” than a “splitter”, I found lots of commonality across categories!
Here in Canada, I’m hoping to bring people to agreement on soft skills, building on frameworks such as:

• Canada’s Essential Skills
  I have to include this framework here in Canada. Along with the more easily measured and leveled Foundational Skills such as literacy, numeracy and document use, these include less defined skills such as Oral Communication, Working With Others, Thinking Skills, Digital Technology and Continuous Learning
• Conference Board of Canada’s Employability Skills 2000+
  Built on top of the Essential Skills, these add “Personal management Skills”, such as positive attitudes and behaviours, responsibility and adaptability
• P21’s Framework for 21st Century Learning
  Cited by the C&G report, this K12-oriented framework has useful categories and good recognition value in both education and business communities
• AAC&U’s VALUE rubrics in the US, leveled for university programs
  This was a key source for Deakin University’s innovative Hallmarks and DeakinDigital’s Open Badges-based degrees  , re-leveled to the Australian Qualification Framework (AQF) at the Bachelor and Masters levels respectively
• Connecting Credentials’ leveled Personal Skills and Social Skills

Given all the overlap and the difficulty in getting universal agreement on terminology, I think that for recognition of employability soft skills via Open Badges it makes sense to simply link to individual frameworks as needed or demanded by different audiences, especially badge consumers such as employers. This way, earned badges will be more locally relevant, aligned to employers’ hiring contexts with a minimum of adjustment on their part (“Don’t make me think!”). The technology should be able to accommodate this  in version 2 of the Open Badges standard: alignment to skills framework(s), which could be a feature of  post-facto third party  endorsement.
Moving on from frameworks, it was very useful to read about the need to remove the concept of morality from character and the focus on “performance character”,  a useful term gleaned from the Character Education Partnership (CEP) in the US:

‘those qualities needed to realise one’s potential for excellence – to develop one’s talents, work hard and achieve goals’‘those qualities needed to realise one’s potential for excellence – to develop one’s talents, work hard and achieve goals’

In an amoral world, this might make a good Assassin’s Creed, however reprehensible that goal might be. If you must be an assassin, you should find your passion and work on your performance character to be the absolutely best one you can…

Second Part: Pedagogy of Employability Soft Skills

This part is where the report came alive for me. Again, there were no simplified prescriptions to follow, but lots of useful case studies and characteristics of exemplary institutions.A key lesson is that employability must be embedded across the curriculum and beyond it, not shoved into its own curriculum silo, or dumped into student services, to be accessed at the end of the program.
Wearing my Open Badge lens, I picked these effective practices out on page 42:

• student-led recording evidence of personal development, accompanying school-led approaches to measure character (note to self:  personal learning pathways)
• use of reward or award systems schemes (note to self: uh, badges?)
• older students working with younger students (note to self: badge the older students)
• opportunities to take part in voluntary programmes and social action in school and in the local community (note to self: badges as modular Co-Curricular Records)

The Ofsted case study of the Halton Borough Council on page 43 hammered on the importance of real employer engagement to get the skinny on opportunities  for Work Integrated Learning and employment, but also to get their input on programme design – which skills and what to call them, so that job candidates are speaking the same language as their employers.
Speaking of language, I appreciated this paragraph on page 45, suggesting the notion of developing ingrained work habits rather than ‘learned’ employability skills:

While most employers, colleges and training providers tend to use a language of skills – employability skills, soft skills, NCS, for example – it is important to see the bigger picture. The CBI has clearly grasped this in its various educational initiatives, and we suggest that we follow its lead by using the word ‘habit’ to elevate this debate to an institutional level rather than allowing it to sit within discussions about individual courses. The evolution of thinking about employability exemplified by the CBI also has the benefit of focusing on ‘employability habits’, skills which have become so much second nature that they are also habitually used.

This helped me see how these are soft skills (or habits!) that could be acquired by many, rather than traits to be recognized in a lucky few. The key super-habit being Dweck’s “growth mindset”:

a combination of self-belief, a willingness to give things a go, seeing mistakes as an inevitable part of making progress, being willing and able to take and learn from feedback, being pre-disposed to share emerging ideas with others and look for their input, valuing hard work and effort, and seeing perseverance as an essential part of human activity.

This is an amalgam of skills that have been defined in various ways in this report. An employer might recognize the totality without troubling to check off each component part.  (But my ePortfolio background tells me that the employer should seek confirmation of his/her conclusion through triangulation of evidence to  avoid the “halo effect” a single impression might create.)
I was interested to learn that non-cognitive skills are still malleable  at the adolescent level, so that resilience, persistence, etc. can still be effectively worked on in high school and early college.
The authors report that “GenY” (Millenial?) workers seek more immediate feedback than Boomer, “attributed to their exposure to instant communication and feedback via internet access and social media.” This suggests personalized digital badge development pathways to monomaniacal people like myself.
The chapter on Co-Curricular learning was particularly good. I hadn’t heard of Learning Companies (pg 54) per se, but I see parallels with practice firms or virtual enterprises, out of continental Europe (see Forbes article.)
I also hadn’t heard of UK’s National Citizen Service, which seems to be quite effective and successful and has surprisingly won support across the political spectrum in the country. Something to think about here in Canada, as we emerge from the rubble of the Katimavik and Canada World Youth programs.
One quibble: the assessment section did not even mention badges, though it did talk about ePortfolios and “the use of technology to support the recording and assessing of employability skills.” I suggest that the authors may want to examine the affordances of digital badges and Open Badges, given their discussion of the tension between formative and summative assessment and ePortfolios.

Summary

This report joins my library of resources on soft skills and I’ll be following up on many of the references cited in it.
I do like the City & Guilds approach of focusing on PD of instructors using Open Badges for reflective learning. This makes for better change management for one thing, getting instructors to reflect on the changes needed. Also, the Scottish Social Services Council has discovered that the reflections contained in such badges are a great source of feedback and qualitative research. I’m sure that City & Guilds will also find this.

I was an Immigration brat: my dad served for 20 years, much of it overseas. So I have a soft spot for this topic.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…with my German Wookie friend

The Transition Penalty for Newcomers

I’m borrowing this term from a 2004 Canadian Labor and Business Centre handbook, which found that it took more than ten years before the unemployment level for immigrants dropped below that of the Canadian-born population. Many remedial steps have been taken since, but many of the barriers persist.

Newcomers are at a disadvantage when they arrive in Canada:

• They may lack sufficient language skills
  Needs in this area have increased with the increasing diversity of our newcomers. Language is often the most obvious deficit and there are many programs in place to improve language skills, increasingly starting overseas.
• Their learning and professional qualifications are often not fully recognized
  Immigrants with academic credentials and professional qualifications must have their documents examined and evaluated by third party services. Where there are gaps in documentation, it’s often difficult to resolve back in their home country.In many cases their qualifications are devalued compared to their home country and they must work to fill the gap. This is particularly true for regulated professions.
• Their work experience is often not recognized
  Canadian employers often have no knowledge of the organizations that the immigrants and refugees may have worked for. Guess whose problem that is? Canadian employers often specify 1-2 years Canadian work experience in their postings, which makes it hard to get started back in your field. Many are forced to take service jobs just to get Canadian experience (and make a living) and risk losing touch with their field of expertise. This is called “skills fossilization”.
• They lack social capital
  In a new country they lack the social connections that can often lead to good jobs. They must build these over again. If they find support in a community from their home country, that can have both positive and negative effects on their adaptation.
• Their soft skills may not fit Canadian norms
  I call it “meta-social skills” and it’s a big issue, related to language skills and the lack of social capital. The implicit language of interpersonal relations can vary a lot between countries. For example, most Canadians don’t jump to their feet when their boss walks into the room. Self-awareness is part of the learning. Many language programs are actually “language and culture” programs.
  
  

  From the Prepare for Canada website

• It’s a long, difficult journey to full integration
  It takes determination and often a bit of luck to succeed: get the language, get the first Canadian job, get the first job in your field, advance up the ladder to your previous level….
  Many give up along the way, resigning themselves to preparing the way for the next generation, whose education can be completed here in Canada, with no transition penalty. Others transfer skills into alternative occupations related to their original field, and this can be a good strategy.
  Regardless, it can be a long multi-year slog, and it’s sometimes difficult to feel that you’re making progress. In language training for example, progress through the lower skill levels can be steep, but it flattens in the mid-high skill levels, frustrating those who need that final 10-20% to get into their target occupation. They often feel stuck.
• The journey needs a more personal approach with better mapping and recognition of progress
  Migrants have individualized assets and gaps, but they are typically trained in cohorts. If tracking of learning occurs, it’s typically tracking of inputs not outcomes. There are sometimes hand-off gaps between service providers. Employers can be  at a loss in evaluating the skills of immigrants and can reactively add unfair criteria that increase the barriers.

How Can Open Badge eCredentials and ePortfolios help?

Have a quick look at these examples which I’ll summarize below:
 

ePortfolios for Newcomers at ISSofBC

ISSofBC is a large immigrant serving agency in BC’s Lower Mainland.
This very short (1m40s) video does a good job of describing how ePortfolios enhance their Language Instruction for Newcomers (LINC) for Employment Program:

 
I helped ISSofBC set up this ePortfolio program with a Train the Trainer series of workshops that leveraged effective practices from projects around the world and showed them how to get the most out of Mahara ePortfolio.
This is an example of an immigrant ePortfolio, following ISSofBC’s method:

Employability ePortfolios for Immigrants: Arrival to Employment – Cannexus 2014

Open Badges for Migrant Professionals at Beuth University

This presentation from a Nordplus adult educators project webinar last November discusses approaches to improving the soft employability skills of professional migrants in Germany:

Open Badges at Beuth University in Berlin

A BeuthBonus workshop session

Open Badges for ESL/EAL Professionals

English Online is a nonprofit service English e-learning service based in Winnipeg.  Since 2014, they’ve hosted an annual virtual conference for English teachers. They recognize different forms of participation with different Open Badges, each with its own distinct criteria and evidence:

The Realize Forum

Reasons why ePortfolios and Open Badge eCredentials Can Help Newcomers

• ePortfolios and Open Badges Support Personal Learning Pathways
  These pathways can be modular, flexible, diverse, portable and shareable.  They can visualize goals and progress toward those goals,  building confidence for newcomers and providing formative information for their advisors.
  Learning from multiple sources can be aggregated and blended in skills passports & ePortfolios, with holistic curation and reflection. For example, I’m currently exploring with others how Kiron Open Higher Education’s innovative MOOC-to-University-Degree strategy for refugees can be enhanced with Recognition of Prior Learning for academic credit through ePortfolios and Open Badges.
  eCredentials can support personalized learning, learning contracts and recognition of learning and performance achievements.
  Recognizing progress and achievement with Open Badge eCredentials can dramatically increase learner retention, as IBM has found out to its delight:
  
  

  Slideshare: Open Badges at IBM

  
  (see details in my post: Open Badge eCredentials: Good Business for Higher Ed (Part 1)) .
• ePortfolios and Open Badge eCredentials Provide Transparent Evidence of Skills and Abilities
  Higher level, more summative “milestone” badges can validate  language skills, technical skills or even soft skills and “work readiness”, if they’re backed by rigorous criteria and assessment from reputable issuers. Embedded evidence can add to authenticity. These can become skills currency for employers and academic institutions.
• Newcomers are social media savvy
  According to this 2009 study, newcomers have decent ICT skills and tend to be more engaged with social media than native-born Canadians. Even many refugees, which proved controversial last year, according to the CBC story below:
  
  

  CBC: For Syrian refugees, smartphones are a lifeline, not a toy

  
  The CBC story is worth a read: examples of smartphone use by savvy refugees include relaying important survival information to others following behind,  language learning and orientation to their new environment.
  Once they arrive here, newcomers are also often trained in ICT applications (e.g. Office, AutoCAD) and how to use LinkedIn for networking. LinkedIn can be a great destination for your more impressive Open Badges, or you may want to consider an ePortfolio. An ePortfolio is a bit like LinkedIn, but with better storage, more flexible display, better alignment to specific criteria and gosh, your data still belongs to you, not LinkedIn. If you can make a LinkedIn profile, you can make an ePortfolio.

Reasons why ePortfolios and Open Badge eCredentials Can Help Other Stakeholders

• Enhanced Online Profile Using Social Media
  IBM reports significant social media benefit with thousands of IBM-branded eCredentials making their way onto LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and company websites. OK, IBM is a global enterprise and its training has great cachet, but smaller software and leadership trainers are already seeing benefits also. I have examples from Canada, like this one:
  
  

  Roy Group

  
  Demonstration of Impact
  Just as IBM can report their outcomes, so too can immigrant service providers better enumerate and communicate the impact of their services to their funders by counting badges issued, accepted, displayed, endorsed, etc.
• Talent Pipelines, Candidate Assessment and Employee Development
  We’re already starting to see this happen, not only with IBM, but with the Belgian public service, the US Manufacturing Institute and a multi-stakeholder regional initiative in Colorado.
• Professional Development for Service Providers
  In addition to the ESL examples above, I’ve previously blogged about the Scottish Social Services Council’s early steps with Open Badges to recognize the informal learning of its 200,000 care workers.Here in Canada, I’m exploring how we might adapt that model with a  non-profit sector council which includes immigrant service providers.

Where to start?

• Professional Development for Service Providers
  Just as I did in last week’s post on Aboriginal Education, I suggest starting with PD for EAL teachers and employment facilitators, because they are “force multipliers”, to quote VIF International.
  If they have a good experience eCredentialing with Open Badges, then they will be evangelists with their learners and with employers.
  There are already a number of PD initiatives across the country, and I think eCredentials could help visualize professional development journeys and make people more enthusiastic about their learning.
  A good skills framework will provide useful hooks to hang eCredentials on. I like the look of these – (thanks to Natalia Aleko for sharing the first one):
  • British Columbia Settlement and Adaptation Program (BCSAP) – Complete Competency Dictionary
  • British Council – Going forward: Continuing Professional Development for English Language Teachers in the UK

• Employers
  Employer awareness is still a limit to the growth of eCredentials, but I’d say it’s mostly due to lack of engagement on the part of most issuers. When employers are approached to participate in the process they can become quite enthusiastic, as the Manufacturing Institute and Colorado experiences show, as does this one from a Wisconsin College:
  
  

  Slideshare: Connecting Higher Education and Workforce

  
  But you actually need to pick up the phone and reach out to them, to build their awareness and give them a chance to endorse the ideas and even some of the eCredentials themselves. It doesn’t take long – a breakfast meeting, maybe?
  In the meantime, immigrant serving organizations are employers too, and that fits with the PD suggestion. As employers, what skills and behaviours do they want to encourage? The Scottish Social Services Council model can help here.
• Newcomer Learners
  As you work the channels above, It’s worthwhile to experiment with informal, low-risk forms of recognition with your learners, such as completion of a collections of tasks such as resume/cover preparation, employer research, language tasks, etc. This will give you a chance to test the idea with them and see what works and doesn’t work.

Final Word

I do hope to find some traction in this area over the coming months. I think it’s ripe, particularly on the PD side.
If anyone has ideas and wants to work with me, please let me know.

I advocate for Open Badge eCredentials up here in Canada.
And I think I need to up my game in Higher Ed, because there’s really not much going on up here in post-secondary, with a handful of exceptions scattered across the country. (Is there anything going on east of Quebec? Please let me know.)
Compared to other countries such as the US, UK, Ireland, Italy and Australia, we haven’t exactly been early adopters in applying the exciting affordances of Open Badges for the benefit of formative and summative assessment and recognition of learning in higher education. I’m sure there are several course-level experiments that I don’t know about, but at the executive level, overall? As an edtech manager recently reported to me about senior management interest in eCredentials at his college: “Crickets….” This despite early explorations in BC and Quebec and several articles from Contact North’s teachonline.ca which I’ll touch on in Part 2 of this post.
I won’t speculate here why this is the case. What I will do is improve what I have the most control over: providing clear business-oriented arguments for institutions to at least dip their toes in the water of micro-credentialing and, together with their colleagues in other countries, begin to explore the synergies between Open Badges and student engagement, graduate employability, research and innovation,  and other issues related to institutional relevance and sustainability.
 

“Future student” pipelines

Recruitment strategies are becoming more sophisticated as institutions compete for students at home and abroad. The more innovative institutions are actively leveraging the similarities between student recruitment and what large companies do with social media and gamification to engage prospects and build talent pipelines into their organizations. After all, it’s just talent at an earlier stage of development, isn’t it?
For example, Open University in the UK is experimenting with Badged Open Courses.

OpenLearn website

• Over 12,000 new visitors a month to OpenLearn
• A very high rate click-throughs to make enquiries (~28%) •
• Completion rates of BOCs are higher than with “traditional”MOOCs
• Very high satisfaction rates (~98%)
• 3000 prospectus requests, 400 formal module registrations
• Up to 57% of survey respondents say that they will be sharing their achievements with an employer or prospective employer

Over in the private sector, IBM is doing some exciting work exploring how Open Badges can have a bottom line impact on eRecruiting and talent development on a global scale. They have issued 100,000’s of Open Badges in  domains such as data analytics. Big Data University, an IBM Canada initiative (!) reports exciting results for their online courses since they were badged:

• 129% increase in enrollments
• 226% increase in course completions
• 694% increase in successful End of Course assessments

Wow. And according to the recent IBM presentation I saw, 85% of the badges claimed have been posted to LinkedIn, which  helps explain the statistics above and makes a good case for Open Badges and social networks.

IBM Training Blog

[archiveorg OpenBadgesCommunityCall17February2016 width=640 height=140 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true]

Enhancing Admissions Criteria

Once students are interested in your institution, evaluating them is next.
Open Badge eCredentials can help with this, but I have to say that the other shoe still needs to drop in admissions officers’ minds, even outside of Canada. I’ll lay out the case for Open Badges here and report back on any emergence, which I do expect in 2016.
Required courses and good marks are the default for admissions assessment in Canada. Thankfully, standardized admissions tests are not popular here, and may even be on the decline  in the US, with hundreds of institutions relegating them to optional status. As for those, according to the Washington Post in 2014:

A three-year national study of colleges that do not require applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores found only “trivial” differences in the college graduation rates or the cumulative grade point average of students between those who do and those who do not send in their standardized test results.

Most institutions up here seem to feel that high school grades are the best predictor of student success. At a few institutions, if applicants think their grades will fall marginally below requirements, they can submit something like the University of Western Ontario’s  Extraordinary Extracurricular Activities and Contributions to Citizenship Profile.
According to OUAC’s eINFO site, some programs may have additional admission criteria that could include evaluation forms, reference forms or autobiographical letters. In some instances, applicants must attend an interview or audition, or submit a portfolio.
(As I explored in a previous post, Open Badges can be curated and aligned to requirements in ePortfolios along with other evidence. That’s one place where the shoe could drop…has it? Anybody?)
Currently, some US institutions are looking for ways to go beyond grades to evaluate the whole person. As reported in a recent post by Dan Hickey on his Remediating Assessment blog, a report from a group of Ivy League admission officers is starting to explore ways to evaluate prospective students for ethical engagement:

Link to report

College admissions can send compelling  messages that both ethical engagement— especially concern for others and  the common good—and intellectual  engagement are highly important.

In his post, Dan explores some interesting ways that Open Badges can authentically demonstrate ethical engagement, primarily through embedding evidence.
I do think that evaluating ethical engagement is a laudable goal, but I’m also interested in intellectual engagement side, which the report really didn’t delve into. But I found at least one institution that does.

Hampshire College

In our admissions, we review an applicant’s whole academic and lived experience. We consider an applicant’s ability to present themselves in essays and interviews, review their recommendations from mentors, and assess factors such as their community engagement and entrepreneurism. And yes, we look closely at high school academic records, though in an unconventional manner. We look for an overarching narrative that shows motivation, discipline, and the capacity for self-reflection.

The results of their “No SAT/ACT” policy:

• The quantity of applications went down but the quality went up
• Enrollment yield (acceptance of invitations) rose from 18% to 26%
• Class diversity increased from 21% to 31% students of color
• First-generation students rose from 12% to 18% in this year’s class
• All the above despite being “kicked off” the U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” rankings in 2015

Hampshire College’s focus on evaluating the whole student in order to select the best candidates for success pays off at the other end too. Hampshire is sixth on Forbes’ list of most entrepreneurial colleges: more than a quarter of Hampshire graduates start their own enterprises: social ventures, investment firms, advocacy organizations, or creative mashups of those and more.
Then again, not all students are destined to be entrepreneurs, so how about this:

We are in the top one percent of colleges nationwide in the percentage of our undergraduate alumni who go on to earn advanced degrees—this on the strength of an education where we assess their capabilities narratively, and where we never, not once, subject them to a numerical or letter grade on a test or course.

See more graduate outcomes here.
Imagine this kind of thinking adapted (not copied) to Aboriginal education reform here in Canada, just as an example.
Now, Hampshire College doesn’t  use Open Badges for Admissions that I know of. I cite them because their focus on “narrative assessment” is Open Badge-friendly. This statement on their Admissions page sounds very badgey to me:

Some of these traits manifest themselves in the trends on your transcripts, others in the work you do outside the classroom.

Here’s a shout out: does anybody know about any institutions currently including Open Badges in their admissions processes, explicity or implicitly?
I noticed that someone at the Sprout Fund said in June 2015:

“Right now there are already a limited number of colleges that are considering badges as part of their admissions process.”

… and I’d love to find out who those are and whether any have made the jump. I’ve reached out to the person quoted, but can anybody at Sprout help?
DePaul University in Chicago was supposed to be looking at it back in 2013, according to the Clinton Global Initiative web site:

Nichole Pinkard, associate professor in DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media, said DePaul will consider Open Badges that document higher-level learning as part of the application process.
“Badges give you a better idea of who the applicant is. They give you a stronger sense of quality and a stronger sense of context of what that person has done in the real world,” Pinkard said. “While digital badges won’t replace anything we currently require, as they become more prominent and more recognized, we would expect more students to include them in their applications to DePaul. The applicant’s academic record will still be the most important consideration.

But I can’t find any evidence of it on their website. Nichole is keynoting at the June Digital Badge Summit in Colorado:

Link to site

Winding up Part 1

The first part of this monster post has focused on how Open Badge eCredentials can enable the transition TO Higher Ed. Next week’s Part 2 will be focused on how Open Badges the transition FROM Higher Ed to employment.
I’ll be attending a conference in Toronto next month hosted by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) with a very promising title:

Conference website

• Demonstrating the “soft” value of Higher Ed
• “Sticky alumni” and nanodegrees
• Virtuous education/research spirals embedded in communities