Noah Geisel, Micro-credential Program Manager at the University of Colorado Boulder and also the Co-founder of the Badge Summit from the University of Colorado, shares his exceptional knowledge and insight on ways of empowering individuals, education institutions, and organizations through digital credentialing and badging.
Noah is a passionate advocate for the transformative power of digital credentialing and badging in education and beyond. As an esteemed educator and researcher, Noah has dedicated considerable effort to exploring innovative ways to recognize and showcase learners’ achievements and skills through digital credentials. Noah has inspired countless educators, institutions, and organizations to embrace the power of digital badges as a means of motivating learners, validating competencies, and fostering lifelong learning.
David Leaser
This is a really great opportunity to meet with Noah Geisel, Noah is the micro-credential program manager at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and he’s also the co- founder of the Badge Summit. Noah, I think we met seven years ago in the early earlier days of badge program development. Things have come a long way and I don’t think we’ve ever had a chance to catch up and capture all your ideas. This will be a great opportunity for people to learn from you on where badges are going and how the whole credential landscape is starting to change in higher education.
Noah Geisel
So happy to be here thanks so much. and it’s a big honor. I’m definitely a big fan.
Jim Daniels
Could you provide an overview background on how you got started, were exposed to digital credentialing and badging and a little bit about what you’ve been doing in that space?
“How do we notice and recognize in formal ways, the stuff that they’re saying really matters. If we’re going to say empathy matters, creativity matters, awareness, critical thinking matter.”
Noah Geisel
I got exposed honestly because of Twitter. I just was very lucky to be following some of the right people at the right time when the first Digital Media and Learning (DML) competition was happening and, early MOZFest gatherings where the kind of people I look to, some of the godfathers of the space, were conceiving things. I was seeing their ideas on Twitter and started to just think, as a frustrated high school teacher in a really innovative school district. They were showing Sir Robinson’s Ted Talk that the real future of teaching and learning is about skills, and I just started to see these things they’re talking about might be the right answers to the question, “How do we notice and recognize in formal ways, the stuff that they’re saying really matters. If we’re going to say empathy matters, creativity matters, awareness, critical thinking matter.”
It was just so clear to me that this stuff has a really good chance to not be a flavor of the week, that it’s going to be ubiquitous and it’s going to change the world, connecting humans with opportunity in ways that are based on merit and skills and competencies and not who they know or race gender, last name and things like that. So, that’s how I got into the space and we got on the radar in the early days Aurora Public Schools. We said there are a lot of brilliant people in white paper land, but in execution land, there’s not necessarily the community of practice where we can be learning and sharing together. We said, let’s share our work. Let’s also open it up to others to share and that’s how I encountered you, David. I remember it was very cool when we saw an email come in and somebody from IBM had heard of our conference and wants to come. At the same time, it was kind of early validation that this is not just us being crazy. There are other people being crazy with us and really believe that this is the future.
David Leaser
How do you get people interested in the org? What did you do to to make traction to get your conference off the ground? And did you then implement digital badges in the public school system or what were some of the early activities you did to get things moving?
“A lot of us even still in 2023 are still kind of on an island doing this work.”
Noah Geisel
In the early days, we started a hashtag badge chat, gathering people from all over the world every Monday night for an hour, and I think later we switched to half an hour. you know. As a result, we started to connect with other people and sharing about their work. And so I think that in some ways just thinking out loud doubles as marketing, getting the word out, especially in a moment when people are hungry. A lot of us even still in 2023 are still kind of on an island doing this work. So being able to find other people who can throw you a life raft and help you, show where the water is, where to get shelter and help you avoid mistakes is invaluable. So I think that it part of it was just right time, right place and I think a whole lot of it was community building, I describe myself as a digital badge community organizer. That had a lot to do with it, just attracting people to the space who are passionate about changing the world and audacious enough to think that they’re actually going to do it. But Twitter chats and social media made a big, big impact.
Jim Daniels
I think you’ll probably share this sentiment: I see a lot of things that I think work really well in the world of digital badging and digital credentialing. I see how it’s matured over the past seven eight years or so that I’ve been involved in it, but I also at the same time feel there’s a lot of runway in front of us in terms of what digital credentialing can really do. I’d love to hear your perspective on what you think we have done right with digital badging and credentialing and where you think there’s a good measure of room for improvement. Any thoughts you have on that?
Noah Geisel
Probably in six months or six years we’re going to realize we didn’t know the half of it, so, with that kind of caveat, I, I think t’s something that’s right is I’m increasingly seeing people talk about ecosystems. I think that for a long time, very few people thinking about who else is involved in this besides just content creators, issuers and learners. The ecosystem, in order for this to be meaningful, has some essential other stakeholders that, if we’re not thinking about them, we’re probably not moving towards decisions. I’d also say that one of the things I’m starting to see on the vendors side is, once you have credentials, where do you store them? These notions of contained bigger envelopes for the smaller envelopes and shipping envelopes, like learning employment records I’m increasingly seeing on the vendor side. You are the owners as primary users and I think that is a big shift. I think institutions that are taking advantage of the metadata and issuing digital credentials that have all that extra context information will be equipping their owners with a competitive advantage over institutions that are choosing not to do.
David Leaser
When we created the, the badge program at IBM, we were hung up on the shapes and the colors and all this visual representation of an achievement. That’s what we were really interested in, and we were literally focused on shapes — don’t use hexagons because they don’t look corporate enough — and things like that and how many colors can be put on that badge. But it’s all about the data. It’s all about the information. We were talking to Denise from MyInnerGenius on another webcast and she was talking about a big company with about 30,000 employees. They ran them through MyInnerGenius. MyInnerGenius reveals a person’s hidden capabilities, all those human capabilities you were talking about. But then it badges them as well. So when they started to analyze the data on who has a college degree who does have a college, gender, race and all this data, they found all kinds of very interesting things. They found that people who had college degrees performed no better in the workforce than people who did not have a college degree. The second thing they found was there were enormous number of women and minorities in this organization who were in low-level positions who would be ideal in managerial positions or leadership positions. But they didn’t have have golden pedigrees, they didn’t have the papers for it. They didn’t have college degrees. They didn’t have the job histories. But what they had were human capabilities that showed they were born leaders. And so the badge information that they got out from MyInnerGenius elevated these people. I’d love your view point on why more organizations aren’t doing that, and maybe you have a recommendation for either HR or for higher education and what they should be doing with that data.
“Despite the enrollment cliff that everyone’s talking about with the so-called traditional college undergrad degree, we’re about to see unprecedented demand for upscaling and reskilling.”
Noah Geisel
I honestly anticipate that similar to that there are a whole lot of projects we’re just not hearing about because they see it as kind of a proprietary company advantage to keep that internal, but we are starting to hear anecdotal stories similar to this. One of the value propositions that we talked about this is better hiring, but one of the other things I think is hugely valuable in industry is retention. And so it’s not just hiring the right people. It’s identifying the “right places on the bus” for them. So many times people want to get in the door with an employer. But the job they’re in is not necessarily the one they want, I’ve heard people describe it as a kind of conceptual shift from viewing things as a career ladder to a career jungle gym. The next job is not the one your boss currently occupies; it might be over here behind a curtain you didn’t know existed. But that HR is going to look at your skills, look at your interest, your passions and they’re going be able to say, “Hey, this might interest you. Let’s introduce you a manager over there internally.” I think we’re going start to see a lot of efficiencies there and I think it really benefits humans. And it affects the bottom line, right? If they can keep people longer, if they can keep them in places where they’re happier, that’s a lot of money. So there, there are huge incentive structures both on the human side and on the cogs on the wheel side.
Skills is a huge piece of the ecosystem. Skills-based hiring is going to be another thing that affects your equity. And despite the enrollment cliff that everyone’s talking about with the so-called traditional college undergrad degree, we’re about to see unprecedented demand for upscaling and reskilling, I think that on the employment side, on the admission side, we’ve become really accustomed to using pitch forks to move a bunch of hay out the way to find our needles. And our pitchforks are tools like a degree, right? And using these proxies and the ACT score, right? They might hint at the skills we want instead of just saying, “These are the skills we need for the job.” A pitchfork is just not the right tool. It’s the right tool for removing hay, but a magnet is a way better tool for finding needles.
And if we tag our needles in smart ways by documenting the skills, competencies and the passions, we can develop software that can look for what we’re actually looking to find in those needles and just not touch the hay.
Jim Daniels
But that underscores the importance of what you mentioned before, that is ensuring what’s inside the badge comes with sufficient detail. We can move from a situation where people are looking for jobs and instead jobs are actually finding people, and I think that gets to the heart of what you just said.
Noah Geisel
Like coaches, they need somebody who’s has leadership skills and they go out and recruit the individuals they need to fill roles.
David Leaser
George Westerman, who is a professor at MIT, said — I was on a panel with him at ASUGSV — he wouldn’t rely on the MIT degree to hire somebody. He would assess them. I think that behind all of this is some sort of assessment and a badge behind it, but, but back to this whole idea of the magnet and the opportunities for higher education: Do you think higher education has an incredible opportunity here if they break down the walls and they start to rethink it now? How do you think badges can help higher education break down those walls?
Noah Geisel
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s even about the badges. So just briefly, we decided “digital badge” and “microcredential” are two different things. We use the word microcredential as a programmatic term. And digital badges are the artifacts that we use to communicate completion. The diploma is not the degree. It’s the vessel. It’s the artifact that communicates about the degree and that’s what I feel about badges, too. If someone could come up with a better technology tomorrow, badges could go away.
I also went to a top name-brand university and I have some grades on my transcript that nobody should trust. My macroeconomics professor felt sorry for me. We now see people self-asserting. I can do XYZ. And even institutions are providing this summary level kind of communicating through the transcript and I think we have a trust crisis right now, whether it’s people photoshopping a degree or getting credit for something. That’s why the buzzword in the industry right now is credential transparency, right? It’s describing what the credential program is about, the earning criteria. This is what separates somebody who showed up and somebody who worked for a credential, showing what they had to do in order to earn it. We are really pushing hard to see Boulder attach evidence, showing they learned all about coding and here’s a link to their Github repository where you can see the project that they did to meet the earning criteria for this. I think trust on the technology side is a huge piece of it, and, on the programmatic side, I think a lot of this is market analysis, right?
“There have been several states that, by executive orders, have said state agencies have to do skills-based hiring. No more using a degree as a proxy, unless it actually is required.”
Skills based hiring is growing in several states now. There have been several states that, by executive orders, have said state agencies have to do skills-based hiring. No more using a degree as a proxy, unless it actually is required. SHRM had a report where they said over 90% of employers want, are implementing or intend to implement skills-based hiring. The same report said that only 7% of hiring managers know how to do that. There’s going to be a huge amount of opportunity to upscale hiring managers on how to do skills-based hiring.
Jim Daniels
You know, I think about someone who is in college. And say they’re earning microcredentials. We’re a very embryonic stage I think in terms of employers being able to ingest what is contained inside of badge in terms of credential data, regardless of what type of credential it is. It could be a microcredential. It could be a full-on certification. So what do you think industry and higher ed could do better in terms of working together or addressing that intersection? I see that as kind of a hot spot in terms of how credentialing using digital badging may evolve going forward. I see the work that goes on in higher ed and I see how employers are embracing it and I spend a lot of time with a foot on both sides of that ecosystem. I’m curious what your take is on that intersection and what should employers be thinking in terms of that intersection and digital credentialing?
Noah Geisel
One of the biggest things that needs to happen basically comes down to the HRIS. These HR information system vendors don’t necessarily have an incentive to do the research and development to develop these products until your clients demand it, and so we have a bit of a chicken in the egg dilemma. I anticipate it’s going to take a couple of those 30,000-person employers, or one of these states where the governor has done an executive order saying we need to do skills-based hiring, but they have a major barrier to implementing this mandate because we can’t do it at scale unless our HRIS consumes these. As soon as a couple of those huge clients go to their HRIS providers and say we’ll give you 18 months to ingest digital credentials so we can scale skills-based hiring, that will force the vendors to develop the software that capable of doing this and then it’ll probably snowball very quickly. They just need one big incentive to get started. I think the other side on the more programmatic side is similar to the market scan
But when we talk about higher ed and employers working hand in hand, I think it’s really about the best success cases that I’m reading about or things where they’re starting from the very beginning of backwards designing from what the jobs need.
David Leaser
I think skills-based hiring could be the thing that pushes this to the next level because it provides the fuel for that.
Noah Geisel
On the incentive structure on the employer side, you have some states where you have two-point or five percent unemployment. With skills-based hiring, you realize economic mobility.
David Leaser
So many people are just within reach of a better job and they maybe need two or three skills out of the ten for the job — they already have the others. But hat’s where assessments come in.
Noah Geisel
Yep.
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