Credential stacking hint: programs aren’t courses

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Littoraly Don

Thanks to Noah Geisel for sharing a version of this RAND/UMichigan report the other week:

**Stackable Credential Pipelines and Equity for Low-Income Individuals – Evidence from Colorado and Ohio** (2023)

It’s helped me understand a little better why so many academics keep talking about stacking badges into undergraduate degrees, which I’ve always thought was a very problematic use case for badges, given all the complexities of articulation, transfer and program mapping, even across departments within an institution, much less across institutions.

I usually encourage people to think about how to showcase, enhance, extend and refresh diplomas and degrees with additional learning that can be stacked for credit and/or industry recognition, or “embedded learning” extracted from longer academic programs (e.g. science or technology skills that will “pop out” in a résumé). I’ve always felt that stacking for industry recognition or even for post-grad certificates would be easier than for undergraduate degrees.

But the title of the report caught my eye, along with this quote:

Earnings gaps shrunk when low-income individuals earned certificates (shorter-term occupational credentials) and then went on to earn degrees.

Who wouldn’t want that? Could I have been wrong (gasp!) in advising people away from stacking credit-based badges into degrees?

But then I read further, and learned more: the history of stackable credentials provides a coeval context for why Open Badges have been so often framed as stackable micro-credentials when that’s just one thing they could do, i.e. act as a digital containers for certificates of various types and sizes – note the dates:

“States and institutions across the United States are pursuing initiatives that support the design of stackable credentials, defined by the U.S. Department of Labor as a “sequence of credentials that can be accumulated over time to build up an individual’s qualifications and help that individual move along a career pathway to further education and different responsibilities, and potentially higher-paying jobs” (Employment and Training Administration, 2010, p. 6).
…
“Stackable credentials have been growing in popularity since the mid-2000s and are an important focus of many state and institutional initiatives to strengthen applied programs in fields such as health care, IT, and advanced manufacturing. These programs aim to open more pathways into and through postsecondary education for historically underserved populations, including low-income individuals.”

So, educators in the US in the mid-2000s, before Open Badges were invented, were already speculating and experimenting with better ways to help low-income learners advance their education incrementally, by moving from technical college certificates into community college diplomas and maybe even into undergraduate degrees. That’s laudable.

Then along come Open Badges in 2011.. how convenient for stackable certificates! And then, well, blockchain of course, because every single component of that stacked credential now HAS to be authenticated, right?

But how limiting for Open Badges, as all the reusable recognition oxygen gets sucked from the landscape of recognition:

… and gets pumped into “modular diplomas”, with all the gnarly baggage of credit articulation, transfer and program recognition, now at a micro level like mismatched Lego bricks across programs and institutions, along with new vocabulary such as “horizontal” and “vertical” and “lattice” to further complicate and confuse. Speaking of which: is a digital badge not good enough to be a micro-credential, or just not big enough? Asking for a friend…

I submit to you that there’s a big difference between stacking a 6-month program certificate into a 1-year certificate into a 2-year diploma into a 4-year degree… (which is what RAND and UMichigan are mostly tracking in their report – very little mention of badges) and trying to do all that with credential units that can go down to a 1-hour micro-credential in Australia, for example. It’s a lot easier to stack credits or 30 or 60 at a time than 1 or 3 or 6 at a time.

I actually support badge stacking, but smaller stacks and clusters, and well beyond academic programs: industry-facing “employment ready” stacks, for example, that can combine knowledge, application, reflection and field experience.
Here’s one from Excellence in Manufacturing, for example:

I’d love to see a follow-up to this RAND report, one that interviews not just academic leaders, but also students about why they made their stacking choices (or not) and also asks employers how they rate the importance of stacked credit to their skills needs. Industry research interviews I was involved in with employers in 2021/2022 indicates that employers and industry bodies are far more conscious of the brand and reputation of educators as a signal of quality than they they are in complex discussions of credit and accreditation, and they’re understandably less concerned about macro-credentials than are institutions.

I like to say that:

Open Badges > Micro-credentials > Digital Certificates

In other words, Open Badges can recognize and enable lots of things, which is both a blessing and a curse for the flexible credentialing standard. Focusing on credit-based micro-credentials stacking into academic macro-credentials like diplomas and degrees can be a big distraction from other important value that micro-credentials can provide, such as contextual authenticity, industry relevance and demonstration of competency.

… not to mention the social recognition value and community connection that can come from less formal types of badges that are not assessed for credit…

Open Recognition Ambassador

Open Recognition Alliance

Ontario Open Badges Forum 2017 – Igniter

eCampusOntario

Reflector – Digital Assessment

Commonwealth of Learning

Recipes for recognizing diverse badges and micro-credentials

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Littoraly Don

This blog post picks up my earlier exploration of Full Spectrum “Inclusive” Credentials. In this post, I’m going to explore how you can structure different types of badges for different recognition purposes and demonstrate the fitness of a badge for its purpose by including what I like to call a “badge content manifest”, otherwise known as a Critical Information Summary. Or more simply, a list of Requirements for the badge.

Before starting, I’ll say that this leverages some really interesting work I’ve been doing recently, helping develop a taxonomy and framework for the Inter-American Development Bank’s CredencialesBID initiative, who started badging in 2018 and have racked up a ton of experience in a relatively short time. I see them as innovators in the space. But also other clients before and since, both big and small. The result has been the development of generic “meta framework” that we provide to clients, along with badge content templates, whose scaffolded prompts match the requirements of the different badges in the taxonomy. This framework and taxonomy are flexible and adjustable (and evolving), but are also robust and coherent and most importantly, are based on experience and emergent practice, NOT pre-conceived policy. The more formal badge structures can be adapted for PLAR/RPL evaluation for credit, but the primary purpose is to clearly communicate the claims that badges are making and how those claims are supported – for ANY audience.

The taxonomy was developed for clients building badge systems on CanCred.ca and Open Badge Factory platforms, leveraging affordances like badge sharing, but the principles are actually pretty universal. I recently mapped a version of the framework for a UN agency currently using a competing platform.

Mapping a badge taxonomy

First, let’s review the top layer of the key diagram I shared 2 posts ago:

NB1: A Demonstration badge can be an evidence package or a live demo. It may manifest as an assessed micro-credential, or it may support self-claimed skills and achievements, or maybe a combination of the two, hence the dotted line, splitting it down the middle.

NB2: I made one revision from the previous version of this: digital badge has become “non-formal badge” because, in my opinion, micro-credentials are really just “formal badges”. I do understand the verbal shorthand of micro-credentials vs. digital badges up here in Canada, but I think it’s a bit binary and can lead to confusion,as this post may start to demonstrate.

Notice the examples provided underneath the different types of badges, such as “course with outcomes assessed” for the Assessment Certificate, a very popular type of micro-credential. Then there is the Completion badge, also very popular, but not really a micro-credential, if there’s no summative assessment. Unlike an Assessment badge, that you should be able to “fail” (otherwise it’s not really summative), you could probably bang away at the knowledge check questions in the Completion badge until you got them. If you evaluated specific examples of these different types of badges in the wild, you would expect to see some indication of the difference in the content of the badge, right? Well, not always, as the current leading candidate for the “Badge Hall of Shame” demonstrated in my last blog post.

Critical Information Summary: an evaluation tool

Enter the badge manifest, or “Critical Information Summary”, essentially a checklist of content elements that badge viewers should expect to see, so they can properly evaluate the badge. A “recipe for recognition”, if you will. The first I heard this term was in Oliver (2019), and the concept has since been adopted by frameworks such as Australia’s National Microcredentials Framework (“Critical information requirements and minimum standards”) and EU’s Recommendation on a European approach to micro-credentials for lifelong learning and employability (“European standard elements”). McGreal and Olcott (2022) have also developed a useful list, based on secondary research (Micro-credentials reference framework for university leaders). It’s worth mentioning eCampusOntario’s Micro-credential Principles and Framework (2020) as an early formative influence here in Canada, but it’s a bit more high level – somewhere between a framework and a checklist.

Problem is, these are all for micro-credentials. Can you say monoculture? What about less formal types of recognition, that might be just as useful and valuable, if not more so than an assessed course credential? The various webinars and MOOCs that didn’t require a summative assessment – useless? Not really. Even better, that employer testimonial, or that evidence package you assembled to support your self-claimed badge, or those endorsements you got from your co-workers? Or the Guru badge you were crowned with in your community of practice? Maybe that award you won in the hackfest at the makerspace? Or the heartfelt “Thank you” badge from the community association that actually tells the story of how you made a difference last summer? These are all different types of recognition, calling for different types of badges with different requirements to make them fit for their respective purposes. The authentic power of badged recognition often comes out of the specific context: the story that the badge can tell about you as an individual that other people might want to know and work with.

Building a content menu for a comprehensive taxonomy

The Open Badge standard itself, with its mandatory and optional fields, makes a great starting point for differentiating badges. Fields such as Description, Evidence, Alignment and Endorsement can meaningfully describe what’s being recognized, if you take care in completing them.

But the most important field for many (including me) is Criteria, what I like to call the beating heart of the badge – what does it take to earn this badge? Problem is, Criteria is a blank canvas, because Open Badges are flexible. Blessing and curse – it has led to some pretty poorly written criteria (did I mention the Badge Hall of Shame?)

Guidance for Criteria

To help manage quality AND fitness for purpose, we have developed custom Criteria content models for the different types of badges. Here is a generic version of a Critical Information Summary menu that I helped develop for the Inter-American Development Bank’s CredencialesBID initiative. The Criteria field breaks out into a series of options, recommendations and mandatory requirements:

(NB: I removed some really interesting community of practice badges to reduce complexity, but I also included a Demonstration badge, the newest element in my evolving taxonomy, not part of the CredencialesBID taxonomy.)

The Open Badge fields and the Critical Information Summary menu for Criteria form the basis of the content templates for each badge, each with its own text scaffolding. These templates can be packaged as text Requirements documents for offline preparation or as badge “blanks” that can be copied into client badge environments to guide creation and can be further adapted to fit local needs.

Since they introduced their badge Requirements documents, CredencialesBID has reported a significant reduction in costly revisions and a much smoother badge production process from the enhanced clarity. So it’s worth doing!

In later posts, I’ll provide a bit more detail about the text scaffolding and I’ll also revisit the design of badge images – not just as branding opportunities, but as signposts for the meaning of your badges – making learning, skills and achievements more visible.

The case for making badge metadata better

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Littoraly Don

“Say what you mean – mean what you say”

<rant>

Recently I saw one of the worst examples of a micro-credential badge in Canada that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen lots of micro-credentials – not all bad mind you, despite my own reservations about micro-credentials as a credentialing monoculture.

When I responded to the invitation from someone on LinkedIn to “View my verified credential“, here’s what I found. In the LinkedIn post, I saw:

Impressive logos: the prominent PSE institution’s logo, the institution’s business school logo, even the prominent client’s logo
(A bit noisy, but OK..)
A badge title that linked leadership to emotional intelligence.
(Promising…)
A big label saying something equivalent to “Fundamentals”.
(So nothing too onerous, but there’s lots of room for different types of learning.)

Viewing the hosted credential on the badge platform, I found:

An Open Badge that was indeed verifiable
Open Badges is the technology standard behind most micro-credentials
A couple of visual labels saying “Learning” and “Fundamentals”, with no links or any other context
Three short “skills” terms
Originally harvested from job ads, two of these were defined automatically from Wikipedia (unattributed), one was undefined. They’re linked to Labour Market Information (US-based by default, but customizable). These are usually provided as prompts for badge creators to pump up the value of their badges by linking them to “real jobs”. Practically speaking they’re usually more useful for technical skills than soft skills like leadership and EQ, largely because of that definition problem, but also the difficulty of assessing soft skills equitably.
Description: (what does this badge say about its holder): Something pasted from the course description about “designed to help [WRONG ClientCompanyName] managers “gain insight” into..(how they relate to EQ as leaders).”
Wrong. Company. Name. Has anyone else noticed this yet?
Criteria (i.e. what does it take to earn this badge): the “beating heart” of the badge:
“Completed [RIGHT ClientCompanyName]:[CourseName]”
One sentence? That’s all? What were the topics? The learning activities? Was it 1 hour or 3 days? What were the outcomes? Were those outcomes assessed? What evidence of application? What does all this add up to?

Just imagine, as I did:

From the front, a chestful of impressive medals, like you might see on a North Korean general
From the rear, a partially open clinical gown, like you might see walking behind a patient in a hospital corridor (no link provided!)

Now try and get that image out of your mind. So far, I haven’t succeeded.

This is a good example of why it’s important to think beyond pretty looking badges with fancy logos, superficial titles and undefined skills terms and really take on board the key message that “there’s data inside” these things:

From openbadges.org, stewarded by 1Edtech

What if people (say, employers) actually look inside your badge to evaluate your skills and learning data? What are they going to think? Dan Hickey, an early thought leader in the open badges space, liked to say that employers and other “consumers” of badges would “drill, drill, drill” the first time seeing a provider’s badge, then just “drill” the next time, to confirm their first experience, then maybe not drill at all, after familiarity and trust have been established.

But how much trust do you think has been built by the badge I described above? More to the point: how much damage has been done to the brands of the organizations involved?

Maybe this was a good course, great even, but how would we know? The poor quality of the credential is definitely not a good sign. A badge is a chance to tell an authentic story about learning and achievement. This was not much more than a headline.

This is NOT about badging platforms – they all do 80-90% what each other do, and mostly compete in other ways. This really comes down to the organizations involved. The issuer organization didn’t care enough to do more than copy and paste from an old badge without checking their work. The client organization didn’t care enough to complain. The person who shared the credential probably doesn’t really care – she’s likely close to retirement and no longer so concerned about career advancement. But a younger, hungrier colleague looking to become a leader would care. Would they proudly share this badge?

This is also NOT about micro-credentials versus digital badges. I bet the issuer would claim that this is a micro-credential, despite the lack of information about assessment. It’s just not a good micro-credential. (I’d probably call it a Participation or Completion badge, but that’s for a later post.)

This is really about managing expectations and building trust in your credentials using:

A transparent framework that declares your values, states your purpose and describes how you will achieve and maintain your purpose
A clear taxonomy of the different types of credentials that your framework covers
(HINT: more than micro-credentials vs “digital badges”)
Solid information requirements for each type of credential in your taxonomy, whether it be formal, non-formal or informal, that are fit for purpose. Not all badges are micro-credentials, but the ones that ARE should meet expectations for that type
Delivering on the above in a demonstrable way
Improving on the above over time

You don’t need to wait for the final definition of micro-credentials to come down from Olympus before you start to take a more structured approach to your own credentialing efforts. Heck, Canada still doesn’t have a national qualifications framework.

And you don’t have to have it ALL figured out before you start. It’s OK to have something that’s at least better and more responsive than what was there before, even if it’s not yet perfect. It’s OK to learn, change and grow, just like our lifelong learners do, because we are all lifelong learners and change is constant. But let’s be clear about what we’re trying to do and how we’re doing it.

In a later post, I’ll go into more detail about frameworks, taxonomies and “Critical Information Summaries“, based on some recent research consultations and implementations I’ve been working on, but I’ll save that for a later post. This one is long enough!

</rant>

The case for full spectrum “inclusive” credentials

Posted on March 5, 2023 by Littoraly Don

Learning Agents’ Adaptable “Meta-Taxonomy” CC BY

TL;DR Preface
My company Learning Agents provides the credentialing taxonomy above as an onboarding tool for CanCred.ca and Open Badge Factory clients, but it’s quite adaptable to other credentialing platforms. It goes well beyond micro-credentials to show that a rich and flexible recognition language can be developed using an inclusive spectrum of credentials that are transparently described and reliably issued. It’s a living document based on experience across sectors and it works for academic institutions, professional bodies, industry associations, individual companies, international NGOs, non profits and charities, etc. The taxonomy is licensed under Creative Commons, so it can be re-used remixed, etc. with attribution to Learning Agents. It’s inspired in part by a great post by Lesley Voigt back in 2020.
On CanCred.ca, it’s supplemented with free credential templates containing content prompts that match the “critical information” expectations for each type of credential. These can be flexibly edited to individual organization needs.
For some clients, Learning Agents has gone further to develop full digital credential frameworks customized to organizational needs that provide a more complete foundation for demonstrable quality and portable recognition, while retaining flexibility and a sense of “fitness for purpose.”
In this post, I’m using the diagram as a soapbox to discuss the need for inclusive recognition across the spectrum of formality.

Quick note: this post explores inclusivity for diverse credentials, not diverse l/earners, which is also a very important topic I may take up in a later post.

Refrain: “We need ONE framework for micro-credentials”

There has been lots of conversation and text written about the need for frameworks for micro-credentials, that academic subset of digital credentials and Open Badges that seems to attract most of the attention in discussions about how to use digital credentials to authentically recognize lifelong and lifewide learning and achievement to benefit l/earners, workforces and communities.

Micro-credentials are an alluring concept, if a bit slippery to define for some. Funders love their promise (though they are increasingly seeking more evidence of their impact.) Employers like the idea (once they become aware of it), like to collaborate on them (if they have the time) and may start using them for recruitment or even for upskilling their incumbent workforce development… if they have time. (Change can be slow.)

Old hands like Tony Bates do legitimately question how much micro-credentials really differ from previous iterations in Continuing Education, Contract Training, “Market Driven Training”, modular programs, online verification of certifications, etc., but let that be for now. Let’s leave some space for micro-credentials to fulfill their promise.

But let’s also leave some space for other types of digital credentials that may be less formal, but no less valuable. Way back in 2016 (49 years in Internet time), I had this to say about learning and formality in this blog:

Professional learning is a conversation, an ever-evolving stream of emergent and examined practice. This is what it means to be a professional. (2016-05-29)

Matthew Farber, a blogger at Edutopia apparently stated it even more elegantly previously, according to A-Z of E-learning:

“Teaching is a design science and learning is a conversation”.

Building on this, I’ll say now that any form of meaningful development is about more than knowledge delivery and assessment, it’s about applying knowledge in your context to deepen your understanding and maybe improve your performance, sometimes alone, but often in the company of others.

Many proponents of micro-credentials don’t see it that way:

So, learning is a conversation… hiring is a conversation… career advancement is a conversation… you get the picture. This blog is a conversation… or should be. (Feedback welcome!)

Recognition as a conversation, at least more than a recruitment filter!

So it becomes less about how assessed micro-credentials, “Verifiable Credentials” and “Learning and Employment Records” will be able to get you past the filtering algorithm of an employer’s Applicant Tracking System in a huge stack of resumes (HR Open Standards is working on this as we speak…) and more about they can become grist for career conversations, examples you can use to help tell your story, differentiate yourself, build trust, be the holistic choice that people want to make at the time of need.

This can be:

evidence of achievements (assessed, self-claimed or whatever) that you can frame, support and share online;
commentary on your experience;
dialogue with others in your various communities;
endorsements from people you respect and who respect you;
values and goals you have set for your life and career.

Imagine you’re in an interview and somebody says “Tell me about yourself,” or “Can you give an example of when…,” or “Where do you want to be in three years?” Might be nice to have some some of these stories to draw from, no? Having them in credential form can help you remember them and contextualize them with supporting evidence and endorsements from others.

Because formal credentials alone are not enough. As a recent Inside Higher Ed article has it:

Reskilling. Upskilling. Certificates. Certifications. Badges. Licenses. Microcredentials. Alternative credentials. Digital credentials.
So many terms. So little agreement on what they mean, least of all in higher ed.
“Employers say, ‘It’s great that this individual has these skills, but we’ll ask our own questions to verify the learner’s knowledge,’” Kyle Albert, assistant research professor at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy, said. “It’s a trust-but-verify situation.

(I like “trust-but-verify”, reminding me that micro-credentials may be anchored to a blockchain to verify ownership and integrity, but their claims about the credential holder may still be be poorly expressed, not backed by assessment evidence and/or not sufficient for full evaluation of the candidate. Many are quite good of course, but the blockchain doesn’t tell you that.)

And there’s still far too much focus on micro-credentials for remedial training for hire whether it’s transition to work or mid-career transition (re-skilling). What happens after you get hired? Will your employer train you and recognize you for that? Will you engage in professional learning communities and industry associations and be recognized for that? What about freelancers and entrepreneurs? Will you recognize yourself and seek validation for that? Will you recognize colleagues and others in your communities?

Lifewide beyond work, what about your local community and the difference you can make closer to home? What about your local region, your country or even global issues such as climate change? There was a great OBF Academy session recently, on badging phenomenon-based learning for climate change.

What about culture? Who are you as a person? It’s about more than matching training-based micro-credentials to job requirements, even assuming that trainers can develop the exact set of micro-credentials that a particular employer has taken the time to specify. I have an old friend with a great business as a consultant chef for restaurants. In social media he shares deep knowledge about menu development and culinary techniques, which helps him get work (along with referrals from happy clients), but he also shares his passion for music – as a player, a teacher and an eclectic listener, which strangely also helps him get work as a restaurant consultant. It’s a way of connecting to the whole person.

People want to work with people, not just collections of skills. Regardless of the skills you can reliably claim, I don’t want to work with you if you’re a sociopath or a do-nothing. (I may need to write that l/earner inclusivity post sooner than later.. 8-> )

Full disclosure: my chef musician friend doesn’t need badges to build his career or social capital further, which has been established over decades. He does like badges (at least he tells me he does) and he might feel differently about using them if he were were starting out today. (By the way, on the “development as conversation” track, he created a multi-level progressive chef development chart as a workforce trainer that works very well as a conversational tool for collaborative assessment…)

As a “mature” professional, I also get a lot of my work from referrals and other channels, but I believe in “drinking my own champagne”, so I continue to use badges and my badge portfolio in my email sig file and RFP proposals to support my claims:

Some Open Badges I’ve earned:

Badge portfolio:

The two in the middle are static, but I’m particularly proud of these two living badges at either end:

The Open Recognition Ambassador badge contains the declarations I made when I was invited to earn it using a badge application form. It also contains evidence and endorsements that I continue to add, keeping the conversation going and the badge alive…

Learning Agents worked with eCampusOntario to develop the first Ontario Open Badges Forum in 2017 (now renamed as the Micro-credential Forum). As a speaker, I earned the Igniter badge, but I like to think I was also a firestarter for digital credentials in Ontario by co-producing the first two forums, and the “after the fact” endorsement in the 2017 badge from David Porter (then CEO) helps make my case.

I don’t think anyone would call these badges micro-credentials, but they do help me tell my story. I think of them as conversational nuggets that I can use or that other people can use to learn about me as a person. Interviews don’t always have to happen in real time…

So, I suggest that when people start speaking earnestly about “quality” and “rigour” in micro-credentials your response should be some combination of “Why?”, “For whom?” and “For what context?”. And maybe: “Is a micro-credential enough?”

Because I think an authentic story can be much more relevant and useful in context than a 100% score in an APA-approved psychometric quiz.

Where’s that champagne?

Stacking micro-credentials: the joy, the horror.

Posted on September 13, 2022 by Littoraly Don

Part of “Scenes from a MOOC” – excerpts from an orphaned video-centric MOOC about micro-credentials based on Open Badges (as most are..)

I often say to people that stacking micro-credentials is one of those things that sound great, but can come with unwanted baggage, can lead to unintended consequences and generally complicate things that were supposed to be simple.

Stacking for what?

l’ll start the discussion with this useful diagram from Brown et al in the Journal of Learning for Development (J4LD). The authors developed a model for a credential ecology that I’ve fiddled with a bit, leaning on the CC BY licence.

Brown, M., Nic Giolla Mhichíl, M., Beirne, E., & Mac Lochlainn, C. (2021).
The Global Micro-Credential Landscape: Charting a New Credential Ecology for Lifelong Learning.

The diagram maps different kinds of credentials across 2 axes:

The vertical axis is about formality, or credit versus non-credit.
The horizontal axis is about credential “bundling”, or aggregation

In the top two quadrants related to credit, diplomas and degrees are called macro-credentials that can be stacked from individual micro-credentials. I’ve added the notion of “meso-credentials” of intermediate sizes in the centre. The bottom two quadrants are focused on industry recognition. The terms provided by the authors aren’t widely used – I’ll just call these non-credit micro-credentials

A new element added by the research team is the concept of transforming non-credit to credit via the Recognition of Prior Learning or RPL. This is what they call the “diagonal axis” and I’ve added diagonal yellow arrows to illustrate. RPL is normally done at the institutional level, based on internal policies, using evidence portfolios and other methods of assessment. Within the institution, it’s usually possible to carry forward the valuation of an external nonformal credential, in the same way that an external academic credit only needs to be evaluated once for credit transfer. There are some initiatives in early development in Canada, Australia and perhaps elsewhere, to build this into a more system-wide approach, using terminology such as “”external credit bank” or “micro-credentials marketplace.”

Horizontal and vertical stacking

Vertical, sequential and horizontal stacking (diagram by Don)

Stacking of micro-credentials is often described as vertical or horizontal. Vertical stacking, also called laddering, usually means that one credential builds on top of another, leveling up as in this Python example. However, leveling up within a skill is not as common as the notion of sequential pathways.

Sequential or linear pathways are programs of learning that have been pre-designed with micro-credentials as signposts on the way. They might include a range of topics and activities, but everything been built into a program plan.

Horizontal stacking is defined as broadening knowledge across multiple topics at a similar level, or perhaps specializations within a topic area. In this example, a creative technology skillset is being broadened with operational and business skills. Horizontal stacking is usually more learner centric than vertical stacking: educators and often learners can swap elements in and out to build more custom solutions.

This very popular and useful image from Bryan Mathers is another take on the various kinds of stacking and pathways:

Pathways by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND

The Stepping Stones model is the one I was just describing: sequential pathways, or linear progressions. They are prescriptive, programmed in advance. This is often the default for an instructional designer. It might be a certificate program in Continuing Education, for example. But this doesn’t have to be the only model.

The Collection model is still prescriptive, but the order doesn’t matter: program requirements are met once enough micro-credentials have been earned, or “collected”. Collections can actually be more flexible than than the preset pie form you see here: think of a honeycomb or a small, multi-cell organism that can add horizontal options organically.

The Constellation is a very popular metaphor that is non-linear AND descriptive. As Rebecca Solnit says:

“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”

So a constellation is human construct: it’s a way of finding patterns, connections and stories among a scattering of stars or a collection of skills and achievements.A constellation can be a way of looking back and making sense of what you’ve already done, as in a portfolio for the Recognition of Prior Learning.Or it can be a way of looking forward at what you might do next, based on what you’ve already done, as in a smart learning ecosystem. This is the most learner-centric and even learner empowered model for pathways.

Dreaming big about stacking

The words horizontal and vertical imply a grid, where the horizontal axis could express the breadth of topics and the vertical axis could express the levels of learning:

I’ve actually provided two vertical axes here. The one on the left displays education qualification levels. Over on the right, I’ve added a popular model for leveling up skills in the context of work that’s mentioned in the Australian National Microcredentials Framework.

As an educator, if your thinking naturally leans toward stacking micro-credentials for credit, then it can be exciting to imagine modular educational pathways for Bachelors degrees for example, where students could complete programs in bite-sized chunks, stepping on and stepping off the “qualifications trolley”, and being recognized for even partial completion of larger qualifications.

Some initiatives are even exploring the feasibility of supporting “build-your-own degrees”, where lifelong learners of all kinds would be able to custom assemble credentials from multiple institutions, based on a common currency for micro-credentials. So in theory, the modularization of credentialing through micro-credentials could take the practice of Credit Articulation and Transfer to an entirely new level.

In practice, we’re not there yet, and it can be very difficult to innovate at the core of established credentialing systems, where the stakes are very high and practices are firmly established. Some objections that have been raised for this vision of stacking credits include:

Lack of awareness and trust between institutions. Micro-credentials do not magically remove structural and cultural barriers to mobility.

Most academic macro-credentials are not “build your own degree”, they are built on specific programs of study, usually within a single institution. A micro-credential may be worth x credits, but only if it can be applied to a program. There are actually very good reasons for having integrated programs that describe a learning arc.

And finally, academic stacking doesn’t solve the problem that micro-credentials were invented to solve, which is to provide more agile and authentic ways to develop and recognize skills. A focus on credit slows things down, comes with baggage and pushes us back to old ways of thinking. And Employers usually say they’re not interested in the credit value of micro-credentials, they are interested in their practical value in the workplace. From an employer perspective, credit may be nothing more than a proxy for quality, that can also be delivered by institutional brand.

Let’s remember that Open Badges were originally invented to recognize and share learning and achievement everywhere. Micro-credentials have emerged as a more formal subset of Open Badges, focused on agile education for workplace skills. But the idea was to supplement, enhance and fill gaps in formal learning, not to replace the entire damn system.

Institutions don’t need to totally reinvent themselves to start reaping the benefits from micro-credentials: innovation can begin at the edges, in Continuing Education, Extension programs, Adult Education, even in Contract Training. Value and quality can be balanced with agility by a “credit ready” approach, where micro-credentials are developed and documented according to standardized processes that can be confirmed for credit later.

This means starting with smaller initiatives and programs more related to workplace-relevant expertise than academic qualifications. And smaller stacks that have immediate practical value. Then maybe think about stacking further, but also think about unifying, transformative elements to bring these things together, that go beyond building a Bachelors like Lego.

Building a regional skills network

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Don Presant

What if…

What if Open Badges* were more than digital course stickers or doggie biscuits for the gamification of learning?

@BryanMMathers

What if they were..

portable credentials?
mobile learning records that could travel with the learner?
modular, remixable portfolios of skills and achievement?

What if they recognized learning outside the classroom:

extra-curricular activities?
community service?
individual achievements?
workplace experience?

What if they were authentic signals of soft skills?
What if (gasp!) they were owned by the learner and could help them build their own human capital and carry it forward? What if Open Badges could help learners and workers build trust and connections across work and learning silos and in new life situations? What if they helped all kinds of people make transitions from secondary to post-secondary education, from education to employment, through career arcs, between careers or even between countries for immigrants and refugees?
What if they were recognized digital tender in regional skills economies?
Well: Open Badges are; Open Badges can; Open Badges do.
But, as William Gibson famously said:

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

What if it could happen in Canada?

Regional skills networks are already emerging elsewhere: Open Badge Academy in the UK, Cities of LRNG in the US, Bestr in Italy, the exciting Humanitarian Passport and elsewhere.
Not so much in Canada. It’s pretty scattered here: typically institution-based (though some independent trainers are using them, Hive Toronto did something, others are making noises), often just an experiment in course gamification at the instructor level, with or without a research agenda.
There’s little or no evidence of portability beyond the institution other than maybe encouragement to post badges on LinkedIn – which is OK, assuming there’s an audience for the badges produced (are they “resume worthy”?) Almost all the efforts I’ve seen in this country have not actively engaged the key “badge consumer”: employers, who could use serious badges as evidence in a talent pipeline, a hiring process or an internal talent search for projects or future leadership.
Make no mistake: the whole point of *OPEN* Badges is to support careers: academic, vocational, professional. Open Badges are designed to be transferable beyond their original context: they’re portable evidence, support for new goals: they should help you get into higher education, the workplace or a new career.

@BryanMMathers

Yes, they can and do have formative value, but if all you’re doing is setting up a system of course stickers, please don’t bother making them open – you’re just confusing people. Please just make “closed” digital badges that stay inside your learning silo, like Khan Academy does.

Starting the journey

Making Open Badges portable across sectors is more work, but it leads to better chances for sustainable success: to think through what skills employers might want (ask them!), what criteria and evidence might demonstrate those skills and how to package these in a workflow that makes sense for all concerned. And not just default to a big proprietary silo, where “free” means paid for with our own data… the Internet is a network, not a pipe. Let’s use it like one.
How can we build skills networks here in Canada? How can we build on what we already do? How can we learn from what’s already working elsewhere and adapt it here?

We’re starting the process in BC, on Canada’s West Coast next month with a free cross-sectoral design lab to develop alternative credentials for careers in the province: the BC Open Badges Forum.
We’ll be applying practices from similar networks and events, such as:

the 2016 Digital Badge Summit in Colorado
the 2016 ePortfolio and Identity Conference (ePIC) in Bologna
London’s 2016 Mozfest
DigitalMe’s work with Open Badge Network in Europe
Pittsburgh’s Remake Learning Network

For example, we’re reaching out as much as we can across sectors in BC:

Education (Higher Ed, Vocational and K12)
Government
Community (After School, Adult Employability, Immigrants and Refugees)
Business and Industry

We’re offering a crash course in Open Badges and how they build careers in other networks. We’re inviting local and external speakers (“Instigators”) to ignite ideas that can be brainstormed in collaborative breakout groups, using design tools that have been tested in action at other venues.

It’s the first step in our journey: bring the players together, present the opportunity and see what happens. It’s picking up momentum (we should have over 100 people from different sectors) and it promises to be a learning experience for all concerned – me included!

Don Presant
CanCred.ca – recognize and share learning in a digital world
Littoraly, learning across the margins

Employability Skills Can Be Learned

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Don Presant

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.

Why do we need the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration?

Posted on September 29, 2016 by Don Presant

I’ve been volunteering on the Program Committee for the annual ePortfolio and Identity Conference (ePIC) for the last few years, working with Serge Ravet and others to come up with topics, lure speakers and participants, and cook up an interesting stew of ideas.
This year’s conference is being held October 26-28 in Bologna, graciously hosted by our CINECA colleagues, who are behind the Bestr platform. Inspired by the location, Serge had the wonderful idea of coming up with a new kind of Bologna Declaration: one that would focus on the practical recognition of capabilities and achievement rather than the formal delivery and assessment of learning.
This really caught my imagination and I worked with Serge to craft what is now called the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration (that’s BORD, not BORING). Here’s the header:

Support the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration

We’re launching the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration officially at the ePIC conference, but it’s already open for your evaluation. If you have comments or suggestions, please make them on the Google Docs version between now and October 26th.
If you feel that the Declaration aligns with your values, we encourage you to sign it by filling in the form at the bottom of the Declaration. And then share it as widely as you can. A great way of doing this is by claiming and sharing the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration badge, coming soon. (We’ll be following up with a BORD Activator badge for those who can show how they are actively supporting BORD values.)
The Declaration has already been unofficially endorsed by these well-known champions of open education:

Sir John Daniel, former Head of the Commonwealth of Learning
Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbic, former Chief of Higher Education at UNESCO
Mark Surman, current Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation
others TBA

… and the list of signatures is growing.
Why?

Because OER is not enough

UNESCO’s Paris OER Declaration called on governments worldwide to openly license publicly funded educational materials for public use.That’s a good thing. BCampus’s Open Textbook Project is already saving students tons of money – great ! But resources are not enough. MIT knew this when they started MIT OpenCourseWare. Content is not learning. You need activities, reflection, assessment – that’s assessment typically by a human being, whether it’s formative or summative.
The OER champions are certainly aware of this; they’re choosing to proceed step by step, which makes sense to me. But I also think we need ultimate goals. And it could be that my ultimate goal is not the same of all those who champion open courseware…

Because formal education is not enough

To continue: The Cape Town Open Declaration was great.OERu is great, so is FutureLearn (although I wonder if they talk to each other?)
And the 1999 Bologna Declaration proposed a vision of free student movement between countries that led to a qualification reform process now adopted by 50 countries. Great! But it’s not enough.
As BORD says:

… formal education is not accessible to all citizens and does not meet all needs. Many argue that formal education represents only a small fraction of the learning that takes place across an individual’s lifespan, most of which goes unrecognised.

This diagram about facilitating 70:20:10 from DeakinPrime, the corporate training arm of Deakin University shows how learning outside the classroom can take many forms in the workplace alone – what about communities?
Training organizations, employers, associations and communities can find better ways to help people learn the things they need to learn closer to the time that they need it.
Applied learning in action.

From DeakinPrime

DeakinDigital takes it a step further at that innovative university, providing a way for mid-career professionals to have their work-related learning formally recognized at the Masters level:

Assuring Graduate Capabilities

But it’s still not enough.

Because formal recognition is not enough

Or maybe it’s too much for the purpose at hand. Do I need a Masters degree to be selected to lead that team? Only if the selection criteria say so. Only if the selection criteria don’t include the magic words “…or equivalent”. Sometimes, as in selecting the best candidate for employment, it’s informal recognition of informal learning that’s most appropriate: the reception of signals of performance, the weighing of evidence of past performance focused on the prediction of future performance.

We need an Open Architecture for Open Recognition

Here are the objectives we set out in BORD:

Open recognition for all: First, we encourage everyone—learners, educators, citizens and organisations—to actively participate in and take ownership of the emerging open recognition movement. Participating includes: taking personal responsibility in one’s own learning and in the recognition of others’ achievements, contributing to the design, implementation and/or exploitation of local and/or global systems of recognition.
Open recognition technologies and infrastructure: Second, we call on the community of learning practitioners and technology developers to establish a trustworthy system of human and machine verifiable learning credentials and to adopt open standards facilitating the comparability and transferability of learning credentials.
Open recognition policies: Third, we call on governments, public authorities and educational stakeholders to implement inclusive policies facilitating and encouraging the recognition of learning achievements whether in formal, non-formal and informal settings, with bridges between all three. Those policies should ensure the existence of multiple developmental pathways, increased flexibility and accessibility and the inclusion of socially excluded and disenfranchised groups.

And Open Badges demonstrate Open Recognition

If you’ve been reading this blog before, you probably expected that this post would get around to Open Badges eventually. They may not be the only way, but Open Badges are a great way to show how open recognition can work
Again, lifted from BORD (bolding mine):

Open Badges have demonstrated that we have the means and the opportunity to put an end to the disparities of the recognition landscape. Connecting and informing competency frameworks, they become the building blocks of an open architecture for the recognition of lifelong and life wide learning achievements. They create the conditions for individuals to be in control of their own recognition, to establish their identity and agency, whether formally (within institutions) or informally (across communities).

Personal agency and control over one’s own recognition are important concepts that people like Serge Ravet are keeping alive in our Open Badges community.

Final words

Recognition, like learning delivery, is not binary; it ranges from formal to informal, as appropriate to the situation.Quality is as quality does. This relates to the type of issuer just as much as to the type of issue.
Beyond Higher Education, professional associations are already credentialing, both formally (certification) and informally (CPD). Industry associations and large enterprises like IBM are learning the community-building power that open recognition brings.
Word is spreading.

Join us at ePIC in Bologna

Help us launch the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration.
We’ll also be advancing thinking about the intersection of ePortfolios and Open Badges with Rick West, Bernard Bull, Dan Hickey, Connie Yowell, IBM’s David Leaser, Atish Gonsalves of the Humanitarian Leadership Academy and a host of other enthusiasts (see speaker list.)

Link to site

A closing word from our sponsor…

Recognize and share learning in a digital world.
Hosted in Canada by Canadians.

Open Badges and the Innovator's Recognition Dilemma

Posted on September 17, 2016 by Don Presant

Open Badges are a Disruptive Innovation

I may be coming late to this party (Tom Vander Ark mentioned this as early as March 2012), but I’m going to be reading more Clayton Christensen over the next while. Why? Because his theories about disruptive innovation help integrate a lot of the thinking that’s inspiring me about Open Badges and the recognition of learning.
Why are Open Badges a disruptive innovation? In a nutshell: Open Badges don’t have to be as “good” as the high quality diplomas and degrees issued by higher education. Instead, they can be a lesser quality, less costly, less difficult solution that fills unmet needs at the edges of the recognition of learning and achievement, such as for Associations.
There’s nothing wrong with less quality, if it’s appropriate for the need, especially if it’s provided at a lower cost and/or has lower barriers to entry. You don’t pour a foundation to build a mobile home. In the same way, Open Badges can be lightweight instead of heavyweight credentials, if those lightweight credentials are good enough to do the job, such as tack a new skill or achievement onto your résumé.
Over time, Open Badges technology and social infrastructure will continue to grow in “quality”and gravitas, with machine-readable taxonomies that enable searching, 3rd party endorsement and other forms of validation, rich extensions, improved post-issuing valorization markets and so on. Eventually they will likely become a more transparent, complete and flexible system than our current high quality diplomas and degrees. Diplomas and degrees will probably be seen more as recognition milestones rather than end points in lifelong learning careers.
This video from 2014’s Globalization of Higher Education conference was the trigger for me. Clayton Christensen was talking more about OER and MOOCs, but his observations apply equally well to Open Badges and the recognition of open learning:

… particularly the section starting at 14 minutes, where he moves on from the classic micro-computer example to talk about how Sony and Panasonic hollowed out the market for vacuum tubes by making transistors for unmet needs: smaller items, such as hearing aids and transistor radios:

gradually making them better and better,

… until by the mid-1980’s you could build pretty big things with solid state electronics. And one by one, it sucked the customers out of the core into the periphery and the periphery then became the core. All of the companies that made vacuum tube products vaporized.(Quoted from above at 19m14s)

This happened despite the vacuum tube industry spending 30 times the R&D money that Sony spent, trying to make transistors meet the needs of their current market. So it’s not like they didn’t see it coming, they were just locked into the needs of their current customer base.
Christensen doesn’t do a great job of describing the concept of non-consumption in the video; it’s better here in this interview with Business Innovation Factory:

According to Clay, true disruption occurs when companies compete against non-consumption. “A new-market disruption is an innovation that enables a larger population of people, who previously lacked the money or skill, now to begin buying and using a product and doing the job for themselves,” explains Clay.
If you’re an upstart chasing after the non-consumer, the great news is that your audience is non-discriminating. They want something easy to use and they want it cheap. They’re not expecting that same level of quality and performance. “Because,” says Clay, “something is so much better than nothing.” (bolding mine)

Tom Vander Ark was not the only person to see this before me. Here’s an excerpt from Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due:Designing Open Badges for a Technology Integration Course, written by a team from BYU:

This makes badges a textbook example of a disruptive innovation according to Christensen et al. (2011) as badges are cheap to produce, and are available to a segment of the education market not currently being served (bolding mine).

(I’m looking forward to discussing this further with one of the authors, BYU’s Rick West at the ePortfolio and Identity Conference next month.)

The Unmet Needs of Associations

Enter Associations as a large bloc of non-consumers of high quality, expensive credentials. Let’s leave aside the high stakes certifications of regulated professions for a moment; instead, think about non-regulated professional associations and industry associations.
Here’s a quote from a recent excellent white paper, The Association Role in the New Education Paradigm:

Associations are well known as advocates for our industries and professions. Less well known, but potentially even more important in today’s world, associations create standards, define boundaries between professional spheres, and identify competencies needed in the employment world. We create educational programming designed to fill needs unmet (bolding mine) by more traditional educational institutions and foster social connections and professional opportunity through networking. Where conventional educational curricula come up short, associations provide industry-specific bodies of knowledge. Where diplomas fail to demonstrate specific competencies, credible and well-designed credentialing and certification efforts can fill the gap.

Hmm… “needs unmet”. Unmet needs. Non-consumption as an opportunity.
In the section entitled “Where Do We Start?”, here’s one starting point that stood out for me:

Micro-Credentialing and Badging
Career paths are no longer linear and simple, with students earning a degree in a particular subject, getting a job in that field, progressing smoothly up a defined career ladder at one company, and retiring with the proverbial gold watch after 40 years. Resumes can’t be linear, either, anymore. Qualifications are now about competencies that can be mixed and matched as necessary to meet employer or licensing requirements. Micro-credentialing and badging were created specifically to address this new way of acquiring and demonstrating skills.(pg 30)

This is what IBM’s David Leaser was talking about when he said in our recent #openepic chat:

#Certifications limit the pool of talent. #OpenBadges expand the pool of talent

And later, from David in the same chat:

Proposal: Use certifications for credentials which have a shelf life of 2 years or more; use Open Badges for “liquid” skills.

Unmet needs again.

The Innovator’s Solution: Deakin Prime and Deakin Digital

What can academic institutions do? Again, from this interview with Business Innovation Factory:

Clay suggests shifting responsibility for answering the disruptive threat to an autonomous organization (bolding mine) that can then frame it as an opportunity. A new organization can pursue alternative channels, utilize different suppliers, and employ different services. Most importantly, they can do this without hindering their current, and most likely profitable value network while also giving their new growth ventures a solid foundation for success.

Can you say DeakinDigital, “a wholly owned subsidiary of Deakin University”? They’re now badging Masters level Recognition of Professional Practice for mid-careeer professionals – meeting unmet needs. They’re now run by the same CEO who runs DeakinPrime, Deakin’s corporate business training arm. This is an example of the Innovator’s Solution.
A bit like Madison Area Technical College’s badge approach to PACE/Corporate training. And several university Extension arms, such as Colorado State and Oregon State. (Typically) uncredentialed cash cows for their institutions.
So it’s starting at the edges… but beware of competition from agile upstarts.

Join us at ePIC in Bologna

I’ll be discussing this and other issues with Rick West, Bernard Bull, Dan Hickey, Connie Yowell, IBM’s David Leaser and a host of other enthusiasts (see speaker list.)
We’ll also be launching the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration. Current supporters of this declaration include Sir John Daniel, Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbic and Mark Surman. More to follow. Be one of them! Comments welcome at the Google Doc draft page.

Link to site

Recognize and share learning in a digital world. Hosted in Canada by Canadians.

Recognizing Soft Skills is Hard Work

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Don Presant

Luigi Mengato CC-BY 2.0

I had a conversation last week with a Canadian colleague, exploring how Open Badges could help youth-serving agencies incorporate “career competencies” into their programming. The ice may finally be breaking up here! I know that we can learn from some exciting initiatives already underway around the world.
Career competencies is her semi-formalized term for what I normally call soft skills: “communication, teamwork, critical thinking etc.” She’s working with a framework that was developed by a Canadian university. There are lots of frameworks out there, which is part of the challenge.
According to my colleague:

These are not easy to accurately assess. But they are necessary!

Boy, is she right – on both counts.
But that’s exactly why I think an “Open Badges aware” solution represents an ideal approach: their simplicity, their modularity, their different degrees of formality, their freedom to traverse contexts… all these make possible a wide array of flexible strategies for the slippery needs of soft skills assessment and recognition.
So I reached out to the Open Badge community asking for leads to the “current state” of Open Badges for soft skills. I got lots and I’ve dug for more.
This blog post starts the discussion.

Why are Soft Skills Important?

The answer is obvious: because employers want them. In fact, they often say they want them more than cognitive and technical skills: “hire for attitude, train for skill.” (Assuming they do train their employees… more later.)
The Canadian Education and Research Institute for Counselling (CERIC) contracted a survey of 500 Canadian business leaders who agreed that “ideal” employees have a good blend of technical and soft skills.
When asked which “soft skills” are most important, they provided this prioritized list of the usual suspects:

CERIC: How Hard Is it to Find Employees with Soft Skills? (2013 data)

I like the long tail, which could help people (at least in Canada) who are designing training and assessment programs and, gosh, badge systems.

“Soft Skills are Hard”

This is a cute title for a recent (ongoing?) Canadian social sciences research study, which so far I’ve only been able to see in four page summary form; the full report is likely still unpublished. More information about “Soft Skills are Hard:” The “Skills Gap” and Importance of “Soft Skills”can be found partway down this page on the funder’s website.
But the summary alone is good. It encapsulates the dialogue around soft skills succinctly. I’ve copied the key messages from the first page verbatim because they so closely align with what I want to talk about over the next few blog posts:

There is wide agreement that “soft” skills (often termed “professional” or “generic” skills) are among the skills essential to employment across sectors.
While there is little agreement, however on how specifically these skills are defined.
While much attention is focused on providing Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) graduates with training in soft skills, less attention is focused on Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) graduates because of an assumption, perhaps mistaken, that these graduates will possess soft skills.
Employers report a “skills gap” and generally do not feel graduates possess sufficient “soft” skills to perform effectively.
There are significant differences in the expectations and perceptions of employers and the perceptions of educators and graduates regarding the level of soft skills graduates possess.
While there are some standardized tests for some soft skills – writing and critical reasoning for example, many soft skills can only be assessed in context and just as there is little agreement on definition, there is little agreement on assessment of these skills.
There are many stakeholders involved in the development and assessment of soft skills and most agree a combination of formal and informal or experiential learning are required.
Because of the way in which soft skills are learned, many segments of the population are disadvantaged in access to the coaching, training and role models needed to develop these skills and cultural biases may play a role in the definition and assessment of soft skills. Moreover the boundaries between “skills” and “personality traits or habits” are blurred particularly with respect to interpersonal skills. A diversity lens is critical.
The lack of consistency in definitions and fragmentation of stakeholders involved in soft skills development compounds the problem and more coordination is needed to develop shared expectations and to bridge the gap between supply and demand.
More research is needed to systematically assess empirically the ways in which soft skills can be defined, developed and evaluated.

What a wonderful row to hoe for Open Badges, don’t you think?
I love point 3 about STEM vs Humanities graduates. I definitely agree with point 7 that ” a combination of formal and informal or experiential learning are required. ” Point 8’s discussion of accessibility and diversity adds a lot of value to the conversation and should be interesting to the large scale Cities of LRNG initiative in the US, whose mission is to bridge development gaps for underserved populations.
I have a quibble with point 6, and maybe it’s just a question of emphasis: yes, context is important but soft skills are supposed to be transferable. An employer doesn’t say in a behavioural interview “tell me about a time in my specific context”. That’s fodder for “Badges as conversation topics and boundary objects” – more on that point later in a future post, but follow the link to read that interesting article in the original.
I have another quibble with point 9 and maybe it has to do with what’s meant by “coordination” for shared expectations. Because our society is not a totalitarian one, I’m I’m not sure we’re going to get “one framework to rule them all”, although 21st Century Skills is trying. Fragmentation and what to do about it is being discussed right now in this thread of the Open Badges Google Group. But in a later post I’ll be making the point that the evolving Open Badge technology standard provides effective ways to cross boundaries.
But this study makes a great starting point.

Coming Up in Future Posts

I’m chunking this fascinating topic into instalments in an effort to cut down the length of my blog posts.
Here’s what I’ve planned so far for upcoming posts:

Defining Soft Skills
You want frameworks? We got frameworks. They’re breeding like rabbits.
Assessing and Recognizing Soft Skills
Beyond testing. Authentic forms of recognition.
Education, Training and Development for Soft Skills
How can we teach this and know that we’re teaching it well? What can we teach and what can’t we teach?When do we get out of the way? When does it stop?
Communicating, “Valorizing”, Analyzing Soft Skills
How do we evaluate between different contexts? What’s the impact on career development and productivity? How can we analyze impact across contexts?

Soft Skills and Open Badges: Best Friends Forever. Let’s explore the relationship together.

Closing plug #1: 2016 Digital Badge Summit

I ‘m looking forward to the learning and networking opportunities as I participate and speak at the exciting Digital Badge Summit on June 24th in the greater Denver area, just before the massive ISTE 2016 conference in Denver itself. There’ll be something for everybody there: K12, Higher Ed, Teacher PD, with a stellar group of speakers.
I plan to learn more about Open Badges for soft skills and I’m curating the Hot Topics thread, which will include sessions on Open Badges and ePortfolios, Trust Networks and Digital Badge Futures. If you’re coming, please reach out!

Link to conference site

Closing plug #2: Recognize and share learning in a digital world

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