We met with Mark Leuba to discuss how standards accelerate the use and value of digital badges. Since 2015, Mark Leuba has been Vice President of Product Management for 1EdTech (formerly known as IMS Global Consortium), the non-profit leader in open education technology standards. In 2017, IMS became the publisher of Open Badges, developed originally by the Mozilla Foundation. IMS’ original breakthrough standards LTI™, Common Cartridge®, OneRoster®, Caliper™ and CASE™ (Competency and Academic Standards Exchange) and the Comprehensive Learner Record Standard™ are propelling transformation in the education to work ecosystem.
David Leaser
1EdTech is the nonprofit leader in open education standards. In 2017, they became the publisher of open badges, developed originally by the Mozilla Foundation. They also created breakthrough technologies like LTI™, Common Cartridge®, OneRoster®, Caliper™ and CASE™. So, we are here to ask Mark a few questions about the future of the industry, and where he thinks it’s going and where you can participate.
Jim Daniels
Great to have you here, Mark. Appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule. So, just to get things kind of kicked off, can you give us a just sort of an elevator pitch on yourself and what would you like people to know about you and what is it that you do?
Mark Leuba
Thanks, Jim and David. I’m happy to be here. You know, I formerly was a corporate IT executive. I turned to education around 2010 and really got jazzed by the mission around education. And I’ve been here at 1EdTech, I think, since 2015, as you noted. 1EdTech is really a unique organization. About 750 member organizations make up 1EdTech. And the goal of the group is to improve technology for learning and for credentials. And a big part of that is developing open interoperability standards like open badges, which is now used by thousands of organizations to issue digital badges and microcredentials worldwide. David, you also mentioned the Comprehensive Learner Record, which, when combined with open badges, make the world’s first digitally verifiable learning and employment records. So, we’re really proud of the work our members have done there. In my role, I’m responsible for the team that develops those interoperability standards working with our members.
David Leaser
Mark, what’s the biggest challenge in workforce readiness you see?
Mark Leuba
I’d have to say, David, that mismatch between qualified workers and opportunities that are there. And this, of course, is a problem that predated the pandemic, but was made much worse in the last few years. I think, you know, this week I happened to be at the Department of Labor Statistics, and there are 11.2 million open jobs and more than one million unemployed people and many more who are under-employed. And you ask yourself. “How many of those individuals have the skills or the potential to do those jobs? And frankly, we don’t know, we don’t know. And our members believe that there is a better way to communicate what a person knows and can do and to make that “education to work” pipeline smarter and more equitable through these digital solutions.
You know, this employability gap is a very complex problem with many contributing factors. For example, some employers will fall back on, I suppose, degree requirements for a position when actually a degree isn’t required. Formal education is very valuable, not to take anything away from it, but we also can’t ignore informal learning and demonstrated skills as qualifications wherever they’re learned and digital credentials can help a lot there.
Other sources of hiring bias, for example, our reliance on legacy networks, professional personal networks, defined candidates . . . we don’t know how many otherwise qualified individuals are being overlooked. Digital credentials are a way to provide high quality, verifiable data about what a candidate knows and can help us eliminate, or at least minimize, the effect of these really unrecognized biases that many of us exercise. Another issue is recruiters are flooded with text-based resumes and they have no hope to actually read and understand all of them. These old methods that we are using, which predate the Internet, are clearly not working to solve today’s problems, this job skills mismatch. So now we have the means to do much better and really improve lives.
David Leaser
I think it’s interesting because I think the average amount of time recruiters spend reading resumes is something like three minutes or something like. It’s typically a resume reader that’s actually an electronic reader. But for you, personally, what’s the biggest challenge you have personally with the work you’re doing?
Mark Leuba
Before I jump to the bad news, let me just talk about the good news. The good news is our members have succeeded in the development of these new digital standards and can plug into HR systems and talent recruiting systems. It’s not hard to get on board to adopt. There are literally dozens available — platforms to which an organization can subscribe to begin issuing these credentials. So that’s the good news. The greatest challenge for us is being able to raise awareness in the corporate HR and career tech communities to show that these high quality, verifiable credentials are coming from a growing number of institutions and issuers that have seen the value of putting learner data in a much more manageable, higher quality and verifiable form.
But what we’re having issues with the HR, and then the tech community, raising awareness, and speaking with you today is a big part of that. So thanks for having me. They need to start updating their systems and their workflows so they can use this better data in their talent systems, initially as a supplement to the traditional resume, but ultimately, as a replacement.
Jim Daniels
I totally agree with that. You’ve outlined a pretty broad set of a pretty big set of challenges, all of which resonates, certainly in the time that I’ve spent working on credential programs, which has been well over seven years now. Can you speak to any specific things that 1EdTech has done to tackle some of these problems? Or things that you’re planning to do to tackle some of these?
Mark Leuba
Well, in addition to publishing the open standards that are that foundational layer of the ecosystem, we’re also leading research with recognized experts in the field, like Northeastern University. We’ve partnered with them to explore employer readiness and their capabilities to accept these digital forms of achievement. And we’ve also led demonstration projects with educators and employers to collaborate on developing curriculum and job definitions that themselves are compatible and can be linked together in a productive way through these credentials. And we’ve developed software we’re using to demonstrate what we call the virtual talent network, which offers the ability for education organizations and employers to issue credentials that can be found on the open Internet through an opt-in mechanism where the learner or the organization would execute through a trusted relationship with recruiters. So, we envision an open and virtual talent network where this information is not bottled up and is actually made available by the learner to help advance her interests in a way that protects privacy and yet still gives her the opportunity to showcase her capabilities and her talents. That project thankfully has been brought to fruition. It’s called Wellspring and it’s available on our website at https://www.imsglobal.org/about/wellspring. And thanks to the generosity of the Charles Koch Foundation and the Walmart Foundation, we’re able to share these resources. We hope to inspire education and HR leaders to adopt these smarter credentials. Our members believe this is an idea whose time has come, and they’re investing heavily and substantially in these implementations.
Jim Daniels
That’s terrific. I’ve looked at the Wellspring Initiative, and that’s pretty powerful work that’s going on there. When you think about that kind of work and the other things that 1EdTech is involved in and how it impacts others, can you provide some sense of how students or credential owners are benefiting from the things that you’re doing?
Mark Leuba
Well, it’s still early days, but in the pilots that have been completed, the learners take a lot of benefit simply from seeing everything in one place — the knowledge, skills and abilities that they have accumulated at an institution or across industries. That’s really a confidence builder and very useful for the individuals to prepare for communicating, for interviews and for helping them form their resumes. But it’s still very, very early for that.
David Leaser
What’s the approach you think others should take in here?
Mark Leuba
You have to take the long view. This is not something that’s going to be done overnight. As a matter of fact, we’ve learned in our work over the last few years that the education and workforce communities don’t think of themselves as ecosystem, but they are, it’s just that they are very inefficient. To fix that inefficiency, we need to adopt some core foundational elements such as interoperability standards so that the market of supply and demand can take over.
Our prior experience has demonstrated that, once we have the foundational interoperability worked out, the market will flourish as soon as the information is available to the buying public. So we expect that same model to work here, but it’s going to take time. Second, for products to be included in this ecosystem, for them to be viable, they’re going to need to adopt open standards. Period. The market doesn’t want proprietary systems that lock in a person’s education and work data. Credentials must be free and interoperable and totally under the control of the individual and not the platform. So, there are the 2 big takeaways.
David Leaser
What about government agencies and other groups? What’s their role? Are they stepping up to the plate right now? Or do they need to do more? How are you working with those types of groups?
Mark Leuba
We partner with a number of organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and many other education groups, and once in a while with the US Department of Education, the US Department of :abor and the US Department of Commerce. I’ll say, making a nod towards the value of open standards and we see their role being very limited frankly. We believe that the government policies ought to encourage the adoption of formally issued standards, but not to play a role in the ecosystem. We don’t believe that that is the best direction as a community. We favor a decentralized market approach to solving these problems. Frankly, we have the tools to do that. The job at hand is to communicate and raise awareness as to what’s possible today.
We don’t think there should be a role for any central controlling organization. We think that ultimately will stifle innovation at this stage. So, even though there is perhaps a risk of some zigging and zagging, and we will experience a little bit more at the end of the day, the outcome will be much more resilient and able to grow if it’s done in a decentralized market driven approach.
Jim Daniels
That’s a great way to cap that off. The work you are doing is just so critical. And it’s something I have brought up more times than I could ever possibly remember or recall. I have a hunch what your answer will be to this, but I’m not going to lead the witness. What’s the one piece of advice you would give someone who’s listening to this today? It could be anyone who could feel the impact of the work 1EdTech is doing.
Mark Leuba
Tech organizations that want to be in this ecosystem — and it’s is fast growing and is going to expand to a very substantial size — if you’re interested in credentials, adopt open standards and get your product certified to be interoperable. That’s the key, you have to be interoperable. One of the services 1EdTech provides to the market is we will test products and certify them as being interoperable and issue a seal of certification. We will actually list them on a product directory so when buyers are looking for products that are known to be interoperable, they’ll come to the 1EdTech website and be able to see your product. So that would be my suggestion for suppliers.
For buyers, it’s kind of the inverse: Never purchase a product that can’t export all the relevant data for your learners and workers using a certifiable open standard. That’s the one way to ensure that your user’s data will not be locked in and that’s essential. We’re talking about people’s learning records and achievement records; effectively, these are people’s lives that are represented through this work. So, we don’t want to have any of that data held hostage. Open standards put the learner and the worker in control.
Jim Daniels
That’s great. Thank you for that answer. It validated my hunch as to what it would be.
David Leaser
Jim, you and I have the same viewpoint on that. There are some in this industry that want to limit the value of badges and pigeonhole them into a certain type of old model. What you’re doing is really terrific because it’s really how do we expand the value of badges and make them more open and more accessible and used for more things.
Jim Daniels
Exactly, you and I have been on the issuing side of this equation as well as on the earner side of it. And I certainly would not want my credentials that I’ve learned in the past seven years locked up without the ability to port them out, or to have those credentials be non-compliant with open standards. So, I think that that just makes all the sense in the world.
Mark Leuba
The digital wallet movement is happening. We’re strongly behind that. We developed a sample digital wallet that we freely share with anyone to get that concept out there because it definitely puts a learner in the middle and the learner can share her credentials with whomever she wants to or not — strictly up to her.
Five years from now, we’ll be talking about those quaint old days, well, maybe 7 years from now, when people used to apply for a job and try to find a job. But in the future, jobs are going to find the person based on matches of their credentials if they choose to become part to enter the market. So, it’s going to be different and it’s all going to be driven by availability of these open standards — and by interested parties, like yourselves, like institutions and employers that see the benefit of moving this.
David Leaser
So, one final question then: Where should people go to get more information? Or if you have any other closing things that we didn’t cover.
Mark Leuba
Thanks I’ll leave you with a couple of links. 1EdTech.org has a section called Digital credentials. It’s a really informative set of pages that explain pretty much everything about the emergence of the standard and how they’re being used and who’s backing it for example. Then the Wellspring Initiative is actually also on the 1EdTech website. You’ll be able to read all about the important work that’s happening with the Wellspring Initiative at https://www.imsglobal.org/about/wellspring.
Jim Daniels
A lot of things that resonated with me. I think what you said earlier about how credentialing and open standards around credentialing can shift the ecosystem from being about job seekers looking for the job and, instead turn that around to the job finding the job seeker is compelling. I think if there was anything that sums all of this up, I think that’s it. I’m going to use that too, as I talk to people. It’s a great way to position it.
Mark Leuba
Thank you, Jim and David, for your leadership in the micro-credential movement. You have both been instrumental in your work and now with the future work you are working on. Congratulations. And thank you because you help to move the market and very substantial way.
David Leaser
Thank you very much.
Jim Daniels
Thank you.
