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Not like everybody else

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Rob Abel, Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, and  Connie Yowell, CEO of Collective Shift
discuss the future of Open Badges during the 2017 Summit on Digital Credentials & Badges.

 

“Cause I’m not like everybody else.” —The Kinks

Standards are the foundation for diversity at scale. Just look around you . . . and then realize that all this diversity came from a common standard that we call DNA. Lack of a foundation in replicable standards means lack of scalability. Think the plethora of grant projects ending up in one-off successes.

Every teacher and every student are not like everybody else. The future of education isn’t massification; it’s personalization. Personalization at scale.

During 1EdTech’s recent quarterly meeting in Orlando, we had the pleasure of hosting a Summit on digital micro-credentials, including Open Badges (a standard and community that 1EdTech is now facilitating after a recent handoff from the Mozilla Foundation).

Micro-credentials and Open Badges are key foundations for scaling personalized education. They are a way to enable and recognize personalized learning and life pathways. In essence, they are a way to create and recognize each person’s unique story.

Educational systems and educators that embrace and perfect micro-credentials will be the ones leading us to the personalized and scalable future.

The Summit by itself would have made anyone’s week. But there was much more at the quarterly meeting.

Agreement was reached on a breakthrough competency and learning standards framework (Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange) that enables digital resources to be mapped to achievement frameworks and thus enables finding and selecting resources based on those frameworks.

A set of leading educational content providers established a breakthrough open source collaboration to enable ubiquitous availability of OneRoster®.

The emerging field of learning analytics continued its advance thanks to an incredible cadre of leaders in 1EdTech who are making learning analytics practical via Caliper Analytics® and 1EdTech’s vibrant partnership with ADL/xAPI.  

Among the most exciting sessions of the week were the Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI®) Showcase and Hackathon. Suppliers and institutions are doing amazing things with LTI apps that can work across platforms. And, yes, there were some very tangible signs that the market is beginning to catch up with the more advanced features of LTI and LTI v2.

If you weren’t there and you’re not like everybody else come join us next time! You’ll see and lead the personalized scalable future of education and learning.