Those who dismiss higher-education e-credentials today are acting like retailers who dismissed e-commerce 20 years ago.
At that time, many retailers, publishers, and booksellers were skeptical of consumer e-commerce. Amazon’s 1997 claim to be the “Earth’s biggest bookstore” garnered lots of attention, as did Barnes & Noble’s lawsuit claiming that Amazon should not be allowed to call itself a real bookstore. While the standards for web payments were well established by 1997, it took perhaps another 10 years for consumer reviews to become sufficiently numerous and credible to create the trust networks that would allow consumer e-commerce to become a thriving and sustainable business model. But by that time, some vendors who were slow to embrace e-commerce had already begun their slow but steady slide toward closures, layoffs, and bankruptcies.
Colleges want to track students and help them succeed, to find out what works in the classroom, and to measure professors’ productivity. Read a special report that unpacks what big data can and can’t do.
Today e-credentials are at a similar juncture as e-commerce in 1997. Most educators and administrators are aware of efforts to extend traditional credentials with innovations such as digital badges, e-portfolios, and “extended” transcripts. Unlike traditional grades and transcripts, e-credentials can contain specific claims of competency and web-based evidence of those competencies. They can be curated, annotated, and distributed over digital networks under the earner’s control. Rather than relying on vague reputations and opaque accreditations, e-credentials speak for themselves.
The concept of e-credentialing got a boost in 2013 with the publication of the Open Badges 1.0 standards by the Mozilla Foundation. Just as web-payment standards made companies like PayPal possible and simplified e-commerce, the Open Badges standards made it possible to issue e-credentials that work across current and future platforms. Also around that time the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funded 30 pioneering efforts to develop new educational programs around badges and to add badges to existing programs. Those events established a thriving community around Open Badges. Innovative programs like the Catalyst Credential initiative at Georgetown University and the Writing Center at Coastal Carolina University are now using badges to motivate students to go beyond course requirements by helping those students stand out from their peers to employers and graduate programs.
But five years is not a lot of time to transform entrenched practices for accrediting, credentialing, admitting, and hiring. Today, many of those stakeholders don’t believe that e-credentials are “real” credentials. Most of the colleges now exploring e-credentials insist that they be scrutinized the same way as conventional credentials. The majority, however, are simply waiting for more employers, recruiters, and graduate programs to value e-credentials more widely before making the leap. Five recent developments suggest that this time is near.
The most important development supporting expanded e-credentials is the release of the Open Badge 2.0 Specifications last December. Akin to consumer reviews, these new standards support the addition of verified third-party endorsements to Open Badges. This means that badges can now carry a name and a logo of a third party, along with a statement regarding the nature of the endorsement, in addition to information about the badge issuer. Consider, for example, Coastal Carolina’s Writing Program. The new standards make it possible for the university’s Writing Center to endorse writing badges issued by instructors, and to determine which instructors are allowed to issue particular badges. Alternatively, the Writing Center might ask an employer association or professional group to endorse the writing badges issued by relevant degree programs.
More important, it is now possible for Open Badges to gain multiple verifiable endorsements after they are issued, and to allow each endorser to include an endorsing statement and feedback. Together, these developments pave the way for previously unimaginable e-credentialing “ecosystems.” For example, a writing program might offer peer-reviewer badges to advanced students who have met certain criteria, who could then endorse the writing badges of other students. Because the peer-reviewer badges could contain links to all reviews and endorsements provided by the earner, those badges should motivate the peer reviewer to offer high-quality peer reviews and send a strong signal to employers and graduate programs that value writing. All the standards and technologies needed to create and automate such systems now exist.
The second relevant development for the rise of e-credentials is the explosive growth of open learning, online learning, and learning in digital social networks. Those innovations support 21st-century learning that is networked, self-directed, project-based, and personalized. E-credentials are ideally suited to credentialing such learning because they can include links to information about courses and programs, completed student work on complex projects, and detailed reviews of that work. Less obviously, e-credentials can document participation in networked learning, “crowdsourced” evidence from social networks, and crucial information about how this evidence was obtained. While this might be irrelevant for elite colleges that can rely on their selectivity and reputation, it is increasingly important for their less-selective counterparts. In the face of low-cost and no-cost competitors, such colleges will be hard pressed to offer value and therefore attract students without turning to evidence-rich e-credentials.
The third recent development was the adoption of the Open Badges Specifications by the IMS Global Learning Consortium in January. IMS Global is responsible for developing the standards that make it possible to create plug-and-play applications that easily add new functionality, including badges, to learning-management systems. This will support further refinement of badge specifications and systems and streamline their integration with other technologies.
The fourth relevant development for e-credentials is the new synergy between Open Badges and digital e-portfolios where students can showcase their work. Thanks in part to interoperability standards, many e-portfolio providers are adding badges to their platforms. This development is producing what one innovative firm has appropriately labeled “learning recognition networks.” These networks make it dramatically easier for learners, educators, employers, and graduate programs to find and communicate with each other, and they have attracted the attention of several American foundations that support education and work-force readiness.
The fifth development is the publication of the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration at an international gathering of innovators last fall. The declaration highlighted the centrality of Open Badges and the belief that much of the innovation will emerge outside of accredited colleges. Open Badges, the declaration stated, “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).”
Together, these developments suggest that open e-credentials in 2017 are indeed as inevitable as e-commerce was in 1997. While something other than Open Badges may prevail, it seems certain that e-credentials will transform education in the next two decades much as e-commerce has changed retailing today. If that is true, colleges and academic programs that continue to ignore or resist e-credentials may have already begun a slow but inevitable decline.
Daniel T. Hickey is a professor and program coordinator with the Learning Science Program at Indiana University at Bloomington. He recently concluded the Open Badges in Higher Education Project with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
