Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

• Digital Badges Are Gaining Traction -e-Literate

  tags: badges credentials corporate alternative

  • ramping up of activity around digital badges
  • noticeable shift in emphasis toward corporate training (or “talent development,” as the lingo du jour would have it)
  • genuine gaps in that market that our college and university system is doing a poor job of filling, which means that their graduates are not doing as well in the job market as they could be
  • lessons from the 2012-2013 MOOC craze was that there are a lot of white-collar professionals who need to keep current on their skills and who are still looking for opportunities to do so. Badges are showing up in this space, but I don’t see a lot of evidence that they are needed. So far, most mid-career folks who are taking MOOCs and other non-certification online courses don’t seem to need something additional to show current or prospective employers what they’ve done
  • Instead, badges seem to be gaining the most traction in career readiness, particular for so-called “middle skills” jobs that require more than high school degree but less than four-year college degree.
  • The credential gap can amount to 25 percentage points or more for middle skill jobs in some occupational families, like Office and Administrative and Business and Financial Operations.
  • This suggests that employers may be relying on a B.A. as a broad recruitment filter that may or may not correspond to specific capabilities needed to do the job.
  • Jobs resist credential inflation when there are good alternatives for identifying skill proficiency. 
  • In many of those occupations with a growing credentials gap, it is worth examining exactly why employers prefer employees with a college education
  • In the latter case, greater alignment between K-12 schools, job training programs, and employers might accomplish the same goal with greater precision.
  • This is gap where I’m seeing the most traction for badges.
  • To a lesser degree, I’m also beginning to hear anecdotes of colleges and universities working with area high schools to create badges around college readiness and earning AP-style credit.
  • The post-credential transition gap opportunity is pretty big with lots of room to grow and no huge barriers to expansion. In contrast, there are many very significant barriers to replacing current, more formal credentials with stackable micro-credentials, ranging from the politics and change management of getting traditional universities to embrace true, top-to-bottom Competency-Based Learning (CBE) to the fact that none of the major SIS systems on the market today handle microcredentials well and I see no reason to believe that either the existing players will improve dramatically or a new player will gain major traction in the near future.

• Providing an “Open” Pathway for Non-Traditional Learners | The EvoLLLution

  tags: pathway learners non-traditional accessibility

• The Transforming Corporate Education Environment: The Impact of Alternative Providers | The EvoLLLution

  tags: education alternative providers credentials corporate non-credit

  • As with any lucrative market, the corporate education space is immensely competitive and numerous players—private organizations, consultancies, colleges, universities and more—leverage their unique competitive advantages to jockey for position and serve their client organizations
  • impact alternative providers have had on the corporate education landscape and reflects on the unique advantages postsecondary and alternative corporate education providers bring to the table.
  • The professional and executive education marketplace is rich with diverse organizations competing for business.
  • corporate training providers coming out of unaccredited organizations.
  • professional development and corporate training marketplace, no one is sure exactly how big it really is.
  • corporate learning groups, consulting firms or individual trainers.
  • One of the primary challenges is that everyone who is hoping to serve this professional development market is trying to leverage unique expertise, capabilities and approaches.
  • While public, open enrollment programs still maintain a healthy share of the market, the growth is in customized programs.
  • This flexibility and client orientation has really helped alternative providers to grow and claim even more of the professional development playing field.
  • training alone is not what organizations are looking for
  • The challenge is making sure that, once the training has taken place, employees can demonstrate the impact of that training in a work environment.
  • They need to understand the subtleties of how to make it work and to track what that person has learned and adopted over time.
  • Alternative providers are bringing new and different perspectives, technologies and capabilities to their clients

• The Transforming Corporate Education Environment: Comparing Competitive Advantages | The EvoLLLution

  tags: education environment credentials providers alternative corporate

  • David Frayer reflected on the impact alternative providers (corporate education providers from unaccredited organizations) have had on the makeup of the corporate training market.

• This Will Go on Your Permanent Record! How Blockchains Can Transform Colleges in a Networked World | The EvoLLLution

  tags: blockchain transcripts credentials flexible distributed-ledger

  • It is meant to be locked in a secure location and only shown on rare occasions—to graduate school admissions offices or hiring managers in HR departments, for instance—to verify attendance, grades, or degrees.
  • The lowly transcript does not capture what a student has learned. Nor does it capture achievement outside of the classroom or the aspirations that may signal long-term career success. A student cannot sign email with a transcript, so it is not tied in any useful way to digital identities. Employers cannot endorse valued skills or the relevance of a project.
  • There is a permanent record today, and it’s called the internet.
  • With rising third-party costs for colleges and universities as well as students’ “less traditional” educational trajectories (jumping between traditional university coursework, online and employer certifications, and other new alternatives to the “course unit”), it seems that the American system of transcripts is due for a digital overhaul. That’s where blockchains come in.
  • blockchains are now being adapted to create Distributed Autonomous Entities (DAE’s) to record contracts or manage the flow of documents through global supply chains.
  • Utilizing blockchain technology, it is now possible to create a decentralized transcript
  • These new transcripts would all require an individual’s private key and would be transparent in that anyone could design applications to connect stakeholders, extract data, add value to individuals and institutions, and arrange to deliver value to stakeholders. A successful implementation of this new kind of decentralized transcript would negate the necessity of costly third-party authorities and would enable students, educational providers and employers to cooperate in a system that provides a more well rounded picture of the modern applicant.
  • Pilots and experiments aimed at exploring these ideas are now underway at a dozen labs around the world. MIT’s Media Lab distributes a smartphone app that allows graduates to sign their emails with a transcript and control the amount of personal information it contains.
  • The Center for 21^st Century Universities at Georgia Tech is building prototype infrastructure that facilitates sharing and assigning value to the growing number of non-traditional certificates and credentials

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.