Deb Everhart shares what CTDL (Credential Transparency Description Language) is, why it was developed and how it will increase the value of your digital badge program. You will learn how using Credential Engine’s programs will improve transparency, interoperability, equivalence and more. And you will see how it can create exposure and improve traction for your digital badge programs. Deborah Everhart serves as the Chief Strategy Officer at Credential Engine, leading the expansion of credential and skill transparency initiatives that enable more effective connections between education and career opportunities.
Jim Daniels
Hello everyone. Welcome to the latest Digital Badge Academy webcast. David Leaser is going to kick things off by introducing our guest, Deb Everhart.
David Leaser
Thank you. We’re lucky to have to have Deb Everhart from Credential Engine with us today. Deb serves as the chief strategy officer at Credential Engine. She leads the credentialing skill transparency initiatives that enable more effective connections between education and career opportunities. Previously she served as a strategic adviser with the American Council on Education, leading Research Groups and nationally recognized experts and has authored a number of important white papers.
She’s been a leader in the development of open technology standards for competency-based learning, comprehensive learner records, and digital verified credentials.
She also chaired the badge alliance work group that defined a conceptual framework and technical standards for Open Badge endorsements, and her business expertise includes leadership roles and technology architecture product strategy at Cengage and Blackboard.
Deb’s thought leadership has evolved through numerous white papers, book chapters, presentations, and blogs on innovations, emerging technologies, portfolios, badges, digital credentials and competency-based learning.
I just wanted to start off with an elevator pitch. If you were giving an elevator pitch on yourself on what it is you do, what would you tell people and what is it that you think makes a difference in this ecosystem?
Deb Everhart
Well, I think you can kind of tell from my bio that most of my career has been invested in learner centric strategies and how do we enable people to actually understand and use their own skills. That has naturally led me into work on competency based learning and digital credentials. I’ve been involved in the open badge movement since the very beginning, so I’m super proud of that and really happy to see how my work now helps influence how other people are contributing to this field.
Jim Daniels
That’s awesome. I’ve always considered you to be a pioneer in this space. I’ve been doing this for over eight years and it seems like a long time, but then I think about the folks like yourself who really were out there at the very early stage. It’s amazing how far it’s come and obviously digital credentialing has grown by leaps and bounds, how they are used, the impact and all of that, but obviously there’s consequences from the growth and there’s a few challenges.
I’m wondering if you could share with us what you see as the biggest challenge today with digital credentialing.
Deb Everhart
I think one of the most important challenges that we need to be addressing together is how to make digital credentials meaningful and therefore useful as we know. So, there are lots of digital credentials out there that either don’t include useful information – and we’ll talk a little bit more about that later – or just don’t have a good definition, a good context for what they mean and how they can be used.
So as credentials continue to grow – I mean, there have been more than 74 million open badges issued globally and there are now about 430,000 open badges offered as digital credentials just in the U. S. Well, what do they mean? If we have that kind of expansion and we don’t have a clear sense of how they’re valuable, then we’re just creating even more credential chaos than is already out there.
Jim Daniels
That’s a really, really good point. How credential engine is coming at this challenge? Some of the things that you all are doing to make sense and bring some order to the chaos, so to speak?
Deb Everhart
Oh sure, but we can’t do it alone. We offer what we think are some really important tools. Credential engine is a nonprofit and our mission is credential and scale transparency. So, we know that there are over a million credentials and various types offered in the U. S. training education space that includes deployments, degrees, licenses, certifications, open badges, and micro-credentials, right? And so how does anyone make sense of all of that and how do we provide open standard technologies to be able to make sense of all of those credentials with useful metadata, including open badges and I would say, especially badges and micro- credentials and that whole other arena of non-degree credentials. That’s one easy way to understand it – to provide some open data infrastructure so that we can understand what all of those different credentials mean.
David Leaser
So, when we hear the word “transparency”, what does that mean exactly and why should people care about it?
Deb Everhart
Credential transparency is one of the three key things we do. One key thing we do is policy and advocacy. The second thing we do is to develop and support the credential transparency description language and the third thing is to support an open registry where any authorized owner of data can make that data publicly available in the credential transparency description language. So, what is it? It’s an openly licensed schema of over 900 different terms to describe all of those different types of credentials. I was talking about skills and competencies, jobs occupations, pathways, transfer value courses and importantly, how all of those things fit together as linked open data.
David Leaser
So, is it like a taxonomy?
Deb Everhart
Well, it’s metadata, so we don’t just take competency taxonomies, for example, and we don’t define actual competency statements. What we do is provide an open standard way of saying this is a competency statement and as part of this competency framework it’s aligned to this occupation and it’s used in this course and it represents and embodies these skills, right? So, if you think about all of the data structure, it helps those things connect to each other. That’s what we do.
Jim Daniels
It sounds like really putting in a layer of context that in some ways has been missing from the credential space. You see credentials and you might see skill tags in them or something like that, and of course there’s the description, what it took to earn it, but context is often the missing piece and it sounds like that is what this is accomplishing, perhaps.
Deb Everhart
And it’s super important context. We have pretty good context for things that have been around for centuries like degrees and courses, right? But when we want know what everyone needs to do with what they’ve learned, it is a much more modular, portable, interchangeable and constantly changing, right? So, we need more detailed information in order to make good use of our skills and credentials. For example, if you have a degree and you say these are the courses, but you don’t know what skills or competencies are represented by those courses, you don’t get very far. And then if you have another type of degree that’s less familiar like a micro-credential people are like, what is this? I don’t have any context for understanding it.
If the transparency gives you a context for saying, oh, this micro-credential is actually applied to this pathway because it covers part of the requirements for this program that can lead to this certificate that is also aligned to this industry certification, then you understand why this micro-credential is valuable and useful because you’ve got context.
Jim Daniels
I couldn’t agree more. That is something I’ve spent a good bit of time helping folks understand. It’s okay to have a really prestigious destination-type of credential out there that someone can strive for and achieve, but having some detail that sits behind that, like in the form of micro- credentials that fit in a pathway that can stack together and provide that rich detail beyond what we’ve seen in the past. Typically, we think about college transcripts, which are just a list of courses and how you did. In the world of digital credentialing, it goes much deeper than that. I’m a huge proponent of having the additional detail.
You mentioned something when we were started this piece of the conversation, which was around policy, which I know credential engine does a lot of work to support. it’s one of those three main pieces that you focus on. You’re doing a lot of work with regional government and state government in terms of policy and that sort of thing. Can you, in general terms, speak to that part of what you’re doing in and how it’s impacting the digital credentialing space?
In my experience over the last eight years, I’ve kind of thought about digital credentialing in the context of three stakeholders – the issuer or the credential, the earner of the credential and say an employer, right? Which I’ve also called the consumer. Recently as I was reading through some of the updated information on your website. There was this aha! moment that kind of stuck out to me, and that’s about policy makers and what’s going on in that space. Can you speak to that?
Deb Everhart
That’s a really important part of our work. We do a lot of work at the level of state and national governments, including globally. Lots of times when people think about policy their brain goes to regulations, right? How can there be rules about credential transparency? How can everyone be required to provide more detailed information and context using transparency? Our policy work is more on the benefit to communities in terms of all the people in that state and the economic development that they all want and the improvement in the employment ability and job satisfaction and wage levels of people in that state. And then it’s also like regions within a state or regions that crossover between states and in fact, one key use case that we support is cross state collaboration where multiple states – now over twenty five we’re working with – put their information into the registry and then they can share it and they know that they’re all speaking the same language in terms of the schema and what those credentials and skills mean. So that creates the ability to share data and create pathways that bridge into new opportunities. It really lifts the level in terms of opportunity for all of those stakeholders.
Jim Daniels
That’s something that most issuers of credentials don’t really think about to any great detail, but it sounds like from an issuing standpoint, especially companies that may have programs that reach outside the borders of the organization itself that are intended to help drive skills in the market in some capacity, or even for employees for that matter.
Deb Everhart
If you take, for example, an education provider for a 4-year or community college, and if they’re offering new programs that are unfamiliar to stakeholders, students would enroll and the employers who would consume those credentials and definitely need this kind of context and clear explanation of what it is, right? And those education providers need and want those enrollments, but they also genuinely need and want those students to be successful when they get those credentials, right? So, transparency is really important there.
Increasingly, those education providers are not doing work that is bound by jurisdictions, right? They’re doing work to help the work of educating people who need to learn skills that are going to carry them across state lines and into other jurisdictions. That’s already true for employers who do business across regional and state boundaries as well as large employers doing business in a global economy. And their employees are going to going to come in and out of employment with them and often come back having gained some skills somewhere else, and so it’s important for employer skills, training and workforce development. And so all of these different ecosystems overlap and if they use proprietary ways of describing those credentials and skills, they’re not just creating impediments within their jurisdiction or within their company, but they’re creating impediments that are barriers for everyone in all directions.
David Leaser
So, we’ve already outlined a couple of benefits I think are really useful, which are transparency and interoperability. There is also completeness of data, which we always see as a big problem. Another one I think about is equivalency. How do we start to provide equivalency? How do we know that right now there is a good system in place in the college market where you can understand that somebody talking in this class at College A is transferable to College B?
That whole registry, what work you’re doing there and if you’ve seen any kind of successes major corporations. For example, an organization issuing credentials related to cybersecurity, which is using the NICE framework, for example, to drive equivalency. There are a lot of other areas like big data or in cloud computing or in artificial intelligence. These areas now are going to require that level interoperability and equivalence, and what can you do to help with that?
Deb Everhart
I don’t think any of us should expect that there’s some huge standard taxonomy that’s going to apply to all of them. That’s just not going to happen and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t be flexible enough. So, when you think about linking to open data, you have to think about all of these different ways of describing the credentials and skills. Let’s just focus on that for a second.
It’s different at this company. It’s different in this state system. It’s different across community college, but none of them have to change what they are using because they can all map to CTDL, and then one or more parties can determine the equivalency level. Let me give you two specific examples that I think also help you visualize the power of the credential transparency description language. One is connecting competencies to each other. You can be very granular about exact matches. And you can also do that to align to NICE and any other actual large occupational skill and competency taxonomies that already exist.
Now that’s just at the competency level. In skill level there’s also this data structure in college transfer value, which is broadly defined, not just to transfer this English course from this college to this college, but also transfer value in terms of transference usefulness. For example, a training program for a job, or a military occupation represents skills that are transferable for academic credit or for this other occupational advancement. That’s all open data and comes from multiple sources and is linked data. All of those different types of relationships can be expressed by this party or that party or a third party or multiple third parties or quality assurance organization and connected using the data schema.
David Leaser
Is it hard to do or time consuming?
Deb Everhart
People want it to be easy. I want it to be easy, but frankly, it’s not. The technology is not the hard part. The human decisions, the business decisions, the development of high-quality education and training resources are really, really hard work. So, what is the value of doing all this hard work anyway. Let’s give it a layer of data transparency to make it exponentially more useful than if it’s in a silo.
Jim Daniels
I think about that a great deal. There’s more that organizations have to be doing in order to address this ongoing challenge. How does someone on the consumer side of credentialing know if two different credentials from different issuers have equivalency? It’s exactly what you mentioned before. Every company has its own way of defining their credentials, their own kinds of taxonomies, unique ways of defining competency levels and their own approach to development of learning content. It’s really about being able to compare and understand very clearly what this equates to. I think companies are starting to get it, and I agree there’s a certain discipline required of credential Issuers to go that extra mile to fill in that space and address the larger challenge that we’ve just talked about.
Along those same lines, if I’m in an organization and I have this large credentialing ecosystem with thousands of different credentials that I have to work with and map into this registry, are there tools to help with that? Can you speak a little bit about how that process would start and what tools or methods might be available to make that happen.
Deb Everhart
Let me first clarify that using the credential transparency description language and using the registry are the two different things that we both support. The structure can be used, for example, inside proprietary systems and it can be used for data exchange between systems as well as being used for linked open data, and so we encourage and support the use of CTDL for any purpose whether or not that purpose is to put data in the registry.
It’s also a living language. It’s a living schema. So whenever someone brings to us use cases that we don’t currently support, we evaluate whether or not that’s something we should support, and then we work with very transparent processes to figure out what would be appropriate. Now the registry isn’t an openly licensed public data store; we host a registry where anyone who’s the authorized source of that data can publish their data to the registry at no charge and anyone who wants can also use those technologies to stand up their own registry as a proprietary system or as another open registry. It would, by definition, talk to ours because that’s what CTDL is designed to do. Two key things I noted: one is the authorized sources of the data. We don’t scrape data. We only get data, for example, directly from the education or training organization or from an authorized party, like a state agency or a national agency and multiple sources. It is important because as I mentioned before, in many cases, the primary use case is just getting data from multiple sources into the same data structure. We offer a variety of freely available tools for manual entry, bulk upload via spreadsheets and APIs. Sometimes people say it’s an open schema and it’s an open registry.
David Leaser
Well, that’s good to know. So that means that you could do this for a company, right? If somebody has a thousand digital badges or something like?
Deb Everhart
They could use their own team and use our open documentation and figure out how to do it themselves or they could get our technical services or other support services.
Jim Daniels
You said something about not scraping data, which I think is really important, especially when you think about someone who wants to come in and make use of the data. I think that’s really important, especially in the day and age of GDPR data privacy. It adds a layer of integrity.
Deb Everhart
One thing I didn’t say is that we do not handle personally identifiable information. We don’t issue credentials, we don’t verify credentials, we don’t know anything about any of the credentials that have been actually issued to people, we handle the metadata and just go to the metadata level.
David Leaser
How does this tie in with other technologies that are out there like the Comprehensive Learner Record or Open Badge platforms learning management systems?
Deb Everhart
That brings us full circle back to that first question. What’s that big challenge? What’s the meaning of these different credentials? Just be very specific and then we can elaborate on this whenever someone issues any type of digital credential. I would say any credential when you issue to a person should have the data structure of what’s inside that credential be mapped to CTDL so that the data structure that’s inside that credential is going to make sense. No matter where it goes in the world it remains aligned and linked to additional data that’s in the registry.
Because that CTDL data that’s out in the world is linked up and data is going to continue to grow and evolve, the meaning of that credential in its context is going to continue to change. Does that make sense?
David Leaser
What kind of data would you put in the registry that would not be in the badge metadata? Would it be like something like a syllabus?
Deb Everhart
Let’s go back to that example of the context of a micro-credential. And so, you’re trying to improve context so that the person who has been issued this micro-credential understands what it means and what the value is, and if they take it to an employer or hired institution that hired institution can read it. I think about it this way. The digital credential is a wrapper, an envelope. For example, the Open Badge structure is in an envelope and it has a few things inside it. Open Badges have eight fields and then there can be additional fields, for example, for skills that are represented inside that digital credential, but usually it’s a small pack.
That alignment link goes from that digital credential out to the registry via a globally unique identifier. So, this is another one of the advantages of CTDL, which is that when you publish data in CTDL, you get a unique identifier, so that, that badge, for example, links to more data in the registry and then you’ll see that this badge is associated to this certificate at this community college, which has this occupational alignment and will lead to this certificate, which is one of the requirements for this job. That’s the data that is there today, right? And then maybe I come back a few months from now, and now multiple colleges are actually using this micro-credential as a way to see that someone else actually evaluated it and said that it has transfer value.
Jim Daniels
What one piece of advice would you offer someone who’s issuing digital credentials that has launched a program and said we want our credentials to be really high value in a way where they have integrity, they’re valued in the industry or by employers, whatever it may be, what would be the one piece of advice you would give those organizations?
Deb Everhart
Give those credentials context through transparent open data. Take everything that you’re already developing, all the hard work you’re already doing and make that information about that credential available in CTDL. Once you do that, you’ve opened up a lot of opportunities for yourself, too, in terms of being able to express equivalences and tying in some additional quality assurance and mapping to other credentials and skills.
Jim Daniels
I don’t think I fully understood this concept a few years back as someone who was responsible for a really large credentialing program, but it’s definitely top of mind today. I just think the work that you all are doing at Credential Engine is fascinating and very needed. It’s something that is really important in order for digital credentialing to continue on a positive growth trajectory.
David Leaser
Where should somebody go to get started to find out more to find out what the value proposition is, or just to learn how to get going here?
Deb Everhart
On our website, you’ll find a lot of resources in terms of understanding what we do and how to get started. We have also pulled together a learning and employment records guide that is not just our work, but also the work of a lot of other experts.
On one hand, digital credentials have been around for a long time, and these technologies have become more and more prevalent. On the other hand, I think we’re still in the early stages of having digital credentials be as meaningful and valuable as they can be. Let’s all work together on that.
Jim Daniels
This has been fantastic and really enlightening. Thanks for taking time from your schedule to be with us today.
Deb Everhart
Well, it’s always good to talk to you guys, and I’m always happy to be doing this good work. So thanks.
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