As colleges experiment with new approaches to transcripts, and employers demand more evidence of so-called soft skills, a new credential ecosystem is emerging. That was a topic at a recent daylong summit called Innovating Academic Credentials, held in Washington in February. During the session, moderated by this Chronicle reporter, a panel of university leaders and industry experts described how the roles of colleges, employers, and students are changing as credentials become digital and more granular. Here are three takeaways from the panel, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Alan Houston, director of academic strategic initiatives at the University of California at San Diego:
“We provide students with an electronic portfolio. We work with either LinkedIn or Portfolium. Students can take the experiences they have in classrooms and the things that they have certified in their co-curricular record, and then present them online. Part of our role is to teach students to curate their own record. We have modules and instructional materials to help them understand how you put together a vibrant portfolio that can then be taken to an employer or a graduate program or any one of a number of organizations to advance your career.”
Scott Bierman, associate vice president for student affairs at Bellevue University:
“We’re here more on the aspirational side. We feel that the credentials that we’re currently using — and I say ‘we’ as in all postsecondary education — let’s just say we could do a better job of communicating learning. Students come to a postsecondary education institution to learn, but mostly to advance their careers. I would say the vast majority of postsecondary institutions do a poor job of really communicating what students learned. Our stance is that whatever we can do to help communicate and tell the students’ stories, at Bellevue University or through their lifetime, is what we need to be doing. We’re curators of the information, not owners, and I think that’s a different perspective.”
Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-market analytics firm:
“A credential represents a signal. It’s a signal that we are presenting to the market, to employers, that vouches for the skills acquired over the course of a student’s education. It’s important as well to realize that that signal is a bidirectional one: This is really a conversation across the job market between supply and demand in a lot of ways. We think of our work at Burning Glass as being able to distill that signal so that those who work in higher education can broadcast more effectively. Employers are actually sending signals about what they’re looking for, but we have no common language in the job market for aggregating that up. Our job at Burning Glass is to translate those millions of signals a day into a common language, so you can say, What are the skills that employers are asking for? What certifications seem to have currency and which ones don’t, so how can we then respond to that?”
Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.
