Advancing Educational Insight, Attainment & Planning
Digital Credentials
Leveraging solutions using digital microcredentials and learner records that can follow a learner from K-12 to career, recognizing experiences and achievements inside and outside of a formal education setting
XCredit
Muzzy Lane and Education Design Lab
User: Lifelong learner
Goals: Scale a means of measuring existing skills that is engaging, innovative, and machine-readable to transform opportunity for all individuals, not just those with the advantage of formal education.
Challenge: The current models of prior learning assessment for informal learning are wholly inadequate: they are labor and time-intensive, involve subjective review, lack transferability, and are not easily integrated with hiring systems.
Solution: XCredit, or Experience Credit, was developed by the non-profit Education Design Lab (EDL) to help learners seeking better career outcomes by creating machine-readable ways to verify existing skills when applying for a job or deciding on new career pathways. A missing link in the emerging skills-based economy, with serious implications for equity, is the ability to easily validate a learner’s life and working experiences as currency for future opportunities.
Muzzy Lane, in partnership with EDL, developed a suite of rigorous, performance-based, auto-graded simulation-based assessments to scale the award of a 21st Century Skills Digital Micro-Credential (Critical Thinking) to act as a signal for employability and advancement.
The assessments are made available to users through various learning management systems (LMS) using 1EdTech's LTI® standard. The Assignment and Grade Services component of LTI Advantage is used to pass individual competencies to the LMS to support issuing of a micro-credential in a badge-issuing system. Finally, the transfer of the verified credential and sub-competencies are then displayed and cataloged in a digital learning wallet for sharing, presenting, and showcasing as a skills currency in the talent marketplace. The assessments are also certified compliant with the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards to make them available to the widest possible audience.
This intricate relationship of data flows required ongoing collaboration, troubleshooting, and investment by both Education Design Lab and Muzzy Lane, as well as coordination across multiple technologies and vendors. 1EdTech's Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR StandardTM) standard is used within the XCredit skills ecosystem.
Learning Impact: The XCredit project and associated Muzzy Lane assessments alter the basic tenet of traditional learning models. They elevate what someone knows and can do to be visible to others and empowers the opportunity seeker in the process, personalizing skill validation and sharing these accomplishments in the skills ecosystem. Assessments are aligned to key competencies and elevate, through the workplace, active simulations, the skills gained through lifelong learning and experiences.
BadgeMe, IBM's Badge Application Workflow Solution
IBM
User: Lifelong learner (corporate)
Goals: Deepen strategic skills and build careers across IBM's workforce.
Challenge: Scaling a program—where all skill and certification level badges must include a skill demonstration component that is reviewed by an IBM subject matter expert—for a large organization.
Solution: BadgeMe, IBM’s application workflow solution, enables thousands of employees to provide skill demonstration evidence via a customized application built “self-serve” by IBM badge issuers. Applications are then routed to SMEs for review and decision, and finally issuance if approved. By requiring IBM subject matter experts to validate skill demonstration via BadgeMe, they have built in a valuable level of rigor to ensure skill attainment.
Badge offerings (available to IBM employees only) are created to spotlight the skills most desired in the market and by IBM. These offerings range from Foundational to Intermediate, Advanced, and Mastery levels, all requiring skill demonstration. The highest stakes credentials include Profession Certifications, like the IBM Data Scientist or Developer Profession Certification.
IBM employees are not required to earn badges, but they can select badges or groups of badges that best fit their personal skill development needs and goals, close their skill gaps, or build new skills to land that next project or role.
BadgeMe is integrated with multiple platforms to ensure flexibility, customization, and the best user experience for our multiple badge personas. Integration with BadgeMe includes a connection to IBM Your Learning platform to validate learning completion or badge prerequisite, HR Information Systems to pull in applicant and reviewer personal info as well as identify managers for routing, IBMs email system for notifications, and connecting to Credly for issuance of Open Badge compliant credentials on our behalf.
Learning Impact: Since launch, over 610 badge applications have been configured in BadgeMe, resulting in +66K badge applications submitted by employees, routed, reviewed, and ultimately issued via our 3rd party issuance partner, Credly. Users have given the platform a +60.5 Net Promoter Score.
On average, top performers earn 50% more badges and double the high-stakes credentials (those requiring skill demonstration) than off-track performers.
IBM Badged Profession Certified employees have an 8% lower voluntary attrition rate than peers without IBM Badged Profession Certification.
Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) Program using Parchment Award CLR Services
Parchment and Temple University
User: Higher education, lifelong learner
Goals: Improve the tools learners have to self-reflect on their holistic education experience as well as communicate with potential employers the knowledge, skills, and abilities they accomplished both inside and outside the classroom.
Challenge: xxx
Solution: Temple University has partnered with Parchment to develop a service in the Parchment Award platform that leverages 1EdTech's Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) standard to allow the collection of institutional data, alignment with an institutional learning framework, and the creation and distribution of digital credentials as a part of their lifelong Credential Profile.
A Temple CLR shows the unique, customized path each learner has achieved in their academic and co-curricular experience. Each CLR is different because the path each learner takes is different. This work is based on the view that producing a CLR is a great way to visually represent personalized learning experiences that an individual otherwise would not practically be able to synthesize, nor would they be able to share that artifact with institutional certification.
Temple learners can review their CLRs to reflect on their experience during their academic program and notice opportunities to amplify experience in areas of strength and/or explore areas that show relatively little activity. In this way, access to their CLR allows learners to customize their experience going forward with reflection.
The project brings in data from multiple sources to form the CLR. Because of the project, the underlying data has now become democratized and consumable to support student success and retention initiatives. The project has also contributed to the discussion about reorganizing academic programs to support experiential learning.
Learning Impact: By making what a learner achieves and accomplishes across their educational experience highly available in a digital form, the framework for deeper insights at both individual and aggregate levels is greater than with traditional processes.
The underlying data gathered during the learner’s journey will now become more accessible and consumable to support retention and successful outcomes initiatives. Learners can use the CLR to help them better understand and articulate their experiences and verified skills, providing formal evidence of achievement that align with their future professional interests and goals.
UNDP in Turkey: Education Mapping and Workforce Alignment of Syrian Refugees in Gaziantep
Sertifier and UNDP
User: K-12, higher education, government, adult/lifelong learner
Goals: Design a comprehensive model to tackle specific challenges refugees face in daily life.
Challenge: Turkey hosts the largest community of refugees in the world because of its proximity to one of the hottest conflict zones worldwide and being the crossroad of global migration flows.
Solution: Sertifier Inc. built a digital identity project to provide quality learning resources and develop a mapping structure allowing refugees in the region to get adopted by the local workforce. Sertifier’s digital certificates include detailed information like proof of participation, program content, and level achieved while applying open standards.
The project is focused on the individuals that belong to the displaced population and designing their reintegration of them into the workforce by building the tools to track and assess their learning pathways. The overall objective was to align education and training with labor market opportunities for Syrian refugees in Turkey, specifically in areas where the influx has placed pressure on urban planning, economic development, and educational resources.
The project aimed to strengthen a local government's capacity to align education provision with labor market needs by providing vocational training to 100 young people (at the start of the project). The learning pathways are created for the group with the partnership of local representatives from Turkey's Ministry of Education.
Learning Impact: The project has resulted in an increase in the employability of participants (with a particular focus on women) by providing them with skills that match labor market needs. This is expected to result in higher incomes and more inclusive growth.
Initially, 200 misplaced and refugee students enrolled in the program and received credentials from the course providing the institution’s usage of the Sertifier application. The process scaled with 11 additional skill training institutions, and 860 Syrian refugees were certified for their skills after various workforce skill learning programs.
The project was also expected to strengthen coordination among relevant stakeholders, including local and central governments, private sector partners, and civil society organizations, by improving their data collection and analysis capacity. This was also going to enable better planning around demand-driven vocational training.
Competency-Based Innovation
Competency-based learning and assessment programs that provide real-world evidence of knowledge and skills mastery
Competency-Based Tracking for Interprofessional Education Leveraging Institutional Data
University of Michigan
User: Higher education, lifelong learner
Goals: Improve the education of health care professionals.
Challenge: The complexity of healthcare education delivery today requires a shift to a more collaborative and coordinated approach with expert teams with demonstrated skills in shared decision-making and joint accountability.
U-M, like institutions across the nation, needs to implement and track interprofessional offerings and competencies across programs to develop healthcare professionals who can work in teams.
Solution: The University of Michigan Center for Interprofessional Education (IPE) promotes the development of collaborative teams through IPE experiences in which students from two or more professions learn about, from, and with each other to enable effective communication and teamwork. U-M’s growing selection of IPE offerings has raised the challenge of tracking the offerings, student participation, and IPE competencies gained by learners. To address this issue, U-M developed a system-wide infrastructure leveraging institutional data to track the competencies students gain as they become skilled teams of collaborative care practitioners who can positively impact the delivery of high-quality, safe, and effective healthcare services.
The competency-based tracking system developed through a collaboration between U-M’s Information and Technology Services (ITS) and the Center for IPE leverages institutional data to track students as they progress through each level of five (5) core IPE competencies. This allows students the freedom to manage their own path to learning while also making it easy for the Center for IPE to track and validate their progress.
U-M has developed a curriculum mapping system that integrates IPE offerings, competencies, and enterprise data. This data set enables curriculum mapping that ultimately makes the accreditation process easier and readily available through the digital platform and allows for tracking the progression of competency development to improve student learning outcomes and ultimately improve patient care.
Learning Impact: Students develop these IPE competencies through traditional semester-based courses, clinical and field experiences, service learning, simulations, online learning modules, and more. Their learning is personalized into paths through which they master the competencies and grow in their ability to represent their professional role on interprofessional teams.
The U-M IPE data platform blends data from various institution enterprise data sources, making it accessible for visualization and reporting purposes.
With the data, the Center for IPE can report to partner schools and leadership about participation in IPE offerings, school contribution to IPE efforts, and the degree of competency acquired by health professions students to continually improve IPE education. It also allows the Center to review how IPE competencies are incorporated across the health science schools and how students build those competencies, all to ultimately improve patient care.
Art Courses Provide Real-World Evidence of Knowledge and Skills Mastery
Florida Virtual School and FlexPoint Education Cloud
User: K-12
Goals: Get kids excited about all aspects of art, including practicing and building their art skills, analyzing art in their world and beyond, producing art products in innovative ways, and even exploring career opportunities in the field of visual arts.
Challenge: A fundamental component of why Florida Virtual School (FLVS) and FlexPoint Education Cloud was created was to bring learning opportunities to students who may not have access to quality education, and art is a great example of that. Whether it’s a single student from a small rural community attending a school with limited access to art courses, or perhaps no art teacher at all, or a large school district seeking to diversify their elective offerings for their students, FLVS provides a rich and diverse group of art offerings committed to fostering a lifelong love and appreciation for the beauty of art in our world.
Solution: Florida Virtual School and FlexPoint offer more than a dozen art courses ranging from Middle School Visual Arts to Advanced Placement® Art History. These courses are focused on meeting students where they are and individualizing their learning experience to meet their needs. The courses also strive to help students discover what they are passionate about in art through hands-on learning, exploring art careers, and using technology. Students are also able to build foundational art skills regardless of skill level.
FLVS and FlexPoint art courses are built on foundational art educational models that ensure quality art education is accessible for all students.
Learning Impact: Tech and hands-on skills will support students in future employment and other online learning. Through individualized learning paths and project-based learning, our teachers can foster creativity and artistic growth in our students. The courses allow students to choose their own supplies and think outside the box. This helps students develop problem-solving skills crucial to their learning development.
Assessment Enhancement With Digital Technology
Applications and tools to assess student performance and outcomes
MagicBox and Folens Ease Assessment with Homework Space
Magic Edtech
User: K-12
Goals: Free up time for teachers to focus on teaching
Challenge: Effective evaluation of learning outcomes is necessary to make teaching more responsive and personalized. In the absence of data-driven decisions and planned learning paths, it is difficult for teachers to help students discover areas of strengths and weaknesses to focus their efforts.
Solution: An end-to-end digital learning and distribution platform, MagicBox™, partnered with Folens, an Ireland-based educational resources provider, to launch Homework Space. The solution offers teachers and students robust tools for assigning, completing, and scoring digital homework assignments anytime, anywhere. The product is built to be easily used by students of all ages. The app also helps teachers save the tremendous amount of time they would have needed to grade the homework.
The MagicBox team continues to support Folens to ensure that the digital platform seamlessly scales as its offerings increase.
Learning Impact: With Homework Space automatically marking assignments, teachers have more time to ensure personalized learning experiences for students. They can spend time on better lesson planning and other areas of teaching. Selecting and assigning homework for each class is effortless.
Students can go to the homework assigned and attempt their answers whenever they wish to before the due date specified for each assignment. The answers are corrected automatically in real time. Teachers can then review the performance and provide individual feedback.
A key feature is the Teacher Dashboard, making it easy to identify which students need more attention and support. It also shows the topics that the class needs to revise. Teachers can create reports to share with the school and parents through the dashboard.
In a survey of Homework Space Customers, 78% of responses noted that Homework Space would save them on average 1-2 hours per week from setting and marking homework.
University of Leeds Accomplishes a "Digital by Default" Strategy with Gradescope by Turnitin
Turnitin and University of Leeds
User: Higher education
Goals: Provide an advanced online education experience—with assessment submission, storage, and grading all online—to students and educators.
Challenge: Great uncertainty around delivering online exams when the pandemic turned learning remote.
Solution: As part of their “Digital by default” strategy, the University of Leeds piloted Gradescope by Turnitin to deliver assessments online, with university-wide adoption planned over two years. When learning moved remote in 2020, the need for Gradescope became critical, and full adoption took place in just two months.
Gradescope helps educators build, administer, organize, grade, and report on handwritten/paper-based and digital assessments and assignments. The platform works for all course modalities (in-person, remote, hybrid), answer types (paragraphs, diagrams, bubble sheets, etc.), and subject areas. Gradescope operates on various platforms; the University of Leeds accesses Gradescope through its Blackboard integration.
Learning Impact: With the help of Gradescope, the University of Leeds was able to transition to remote learning, continue and scale courses at quality, and improve educator feedback to students—during and post-lockdowns.
More than 3,000 educators and 15,000 students at the University of Leeds continue to use Gradescope for modernized assessment administration, even with the return to campus.
Education-to-Work Partnerships
Effective examples of cross-sector collaboration to bridge the gap between education and employment or better opportunities
CTE Courses Build Soft Skills & Increase Employability
Florida Virtual School and FlexPoint Education Cloud
User: K-12 (high school), higher education
Goals: Connecting students to high-wage and high-demand careers in a variety of industries.
Challenge: Education has long measured learning and student success by testing the “hard skills” through statewide assessments, SAT/ACT scores, grade point averages, and more. However, LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report found that 92% of hiring professionals say soft skills like emotional intelligence, communication, and interpersonal skills matter as much, or more, than hard skills.
Solution: FLVS and FlexPoint developers created an in-course resume-building tool that walks students through creating a resume suited to the industry/career they are interested in, as well as assisting students with career planning. Additionally, courses include opportunities for students to interact with industry professionals to gain experience in their field(s) of interest.
According to research by the U.S. Department of Education, students who take Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses in high school have a higher graduation rate, employability, and employment earnings. Knowing that CTE courses make a difference in the lives of students, FLVS and FlexPoint developed CTE courses and programs of study that can help students enter into careers that are high-skill, high-wage, and high-demand.
FLVS and FlexPoint offer more than 20 CTE courses in eight career clusters, ranging from Information Technology to Agricultural Communications. Courses are built for various Learning Management Systems, so they can be delivered electronically to multiple platforms and users. Currently, courses are delivered to about a dozen different LMSs. Traditionally, courses are accessed by students via the internet LMS log-in credential. Schools can offer FLVS and FlexPoint courses in a variety of ways, including the brick-and-mortar classroom, blended learning environments, or entirely online.
Learning Impact: Approximately 20,000 students have taken FLVS and FlexPoint CTE courses, setting themselves up for success post-high school and/or college graduation.
Career Builder reports that 77% of employers are looking for candidates with soft skills. About 77% of employers from in-demand industries report hiring individuals because of knowledge and skills gained from their CTE experience. High school CTE concentrators are more likely than non-concentrators to be employed full-time and have higher median annual earnings eight years after graduation.
Learning Analytics
Collection, viewing, and analysis of learning-related data to understand student behaviors and progress, understand a digital product and pedagogy use and effectiveness, and improve teaching and learning
Elements of Success – Promoting Self-Regulated Learning through Learning Analytics
University of Iowa
User: Higher Education
Goals: Improve student success through real-world applications of data for learning analytics.
Challenge: Student metacognitive monitoring is a critical skill for academic success. Students may have questions or misconceptions about how they are doing, such as courses with high enrollment or courses that grade on a curve. Students often speculate about their performance compared to peers, how their efforts affect their grades, and if resources and support options are available.
Solution: Elements of Success (EoS) is a learning analytics platform that helps students achieve their desired course outcomes by providing real-time feedback. Created by the University of Iowa, in close collaboration with faculty, EoS provides students with new insights into their course progress.
By pulling and aggregating data directly from the Canvas gradebook, EoS generates real-time performance feedback for students in an easy-to-understand visual format which helps students succeed by answering a few critical questions: (1) How am I doing right now? (2) What will happen if I continue on this path? and (3) How can I improve?
EoS helps students understand the connection between the actions they take in a course and their final grade. EoS also fosters more realistic expectations of what might be required to achieve their desired grade after a setback (e.g., a low score on an early exam).
EoS is designed to foster student self-regulated learning by setting goals and actions and monitoring their progress to achieve desired outcomes. In particular, EoS helps students who may not be familiar with a course grade scheme better understand their progress.
EoS integrates into Canvas via the LTI® (Learning Tools Interoperability®) open standard and regularly uses Canvas' API to "pull together" data from Canvas' grade book and has started to take advantage of the 1EdTech Caliper Analytics® standard as it consumes Canvas Live Events to display to a student how the actions they are taking within Canvas compare with their peers. It also pulls data from Unizin's Data Platform (UDP).
Learning Impact: Students report that the Estimated Grade and Percentile Rank features are the most helpful. The Estimated Grade is a letter grade based on available points, category weights, and the course grade scheme. The Percentile Rank shows what percentile the student's total earned scores fall into based on available points and category weights.
From research on the impact of EoS, we found a consistent positive association between the use of EoS and course outcomes (e.g., Russell, Smith, & Larsen, 2020; Van Horne et al., 2018). Further, at-risk students who used EoS regularly are more resilient than those who did not use EoS. After controlling for prior learning outcomes, demographics, and self-reported study skills (Russell, Smith, & Larsen, 2020), at-risk EoS users whose estimated grade was a D or F at week five were more likely to earn a final passing grade (C- or above) than at-risk students who never used EoS.
Student adoption rates of EoS can vary across courses, ranging between 65% and 95%. The greatest potential for EoS is when it is made available to students from the third week of the semester until the last week of the semester.
After controlling for student performance on their first exam, GPA, and homework scores before the first exam, the research found that students who regularly checked EoS achieved significantly higher scores on subsequent exams and better final grades than students who did not check.
Students who were shown an estimated grade of a D or lower in EoS were significantly more likely to receive a passing final grade compared to similar students who did not use EoS.
There was no increased risk of withdrawal from the course for these students.