The Next 5 Years of Digital Credentialing

The exciting world of digital credentialing is evolving fast, and while there are incredible opportunities for scalability, there are a few challenges to address to ensure impactful growth in this education landscape. Amid the rise of microcredentials, badges, and diversified student skills, a few questions persist.

Looking ahead, how can educators, facilitators, and registrars officialize microcredentials and badges, making them part of a formal academic record? How can digital credentialing better represent the skills and competencies of students, putting them in better positions for smoother recruitment and employment?

In this article, we’re spotlighting where digital credentialing can and should go, detailing how high schools and institutions can embrace a digital transformation and transcript exchange. We were joined by Jason Weaver, Vice President of Product and Technology at Instructure, to unpack and make projections about the future of digital credentials.

Breaking Down the Most Important Terminology: Your Quick Glossary

Before we get into how enrollment practitioners, education facilitators, and institutions can scale digitality and create more opportunities for students to experience seamless academic transitions and credentialing journeys, here’s a quick recap of the most important terminology:

Academic transcripts: Transcripts are official records that detail a student’s full academic history, featuring courses taken, their corresponding grades, credits earned, and certifications awarded.
Alternative credentials: Alternative credentials are non-traditional merits that verify and validate a student’s skills, competencies, and capabilities in preparation for advanced study or formal employment.
Badges and credentials: Traditional credentials and badges represent a student’s academic and skills achievements, putting them in good standing to access viable employment opportunities.
Digital credentialing: Digital credentialing is the process of making students’ academic certifications, awards, badges, qualifications, and credentials readily available. They become shareable over digital mediums and are easily verifiable.
Microcredentials: These are skills or competency-based recognitions allowing learners to demonstrate learning and mastery in particular subject areas.

Understanding Digital Credentialing and Its Impact

Digital credentialing is changing the higher education landscape dynamically, opening more doors for students from different academic backgrounds to advance their career pathways. Credentialing is going beyond the traditional transcript; it’s also about finding new ways, forms, and functions to maximize the multi-faceted purpose that credentials serve.

Jason Weaver, Instructure’s Vice President of Product and Technology, talks about the importance of assessing each student’s long-term academic trajectory. “We’ve expanded our thinking beyond the high school learner’s journey; we also think about lifelong learning and the different pathways that learners explore with their credentials to have outcomes in education and the workforce.”

When educators, program facilitators, and institutions join forces to develop innovative, high-value, high-investment digital credential strategies, ideally, we foster a scenario where credentials have meaning. Our current technology ecosystem pushes the limits of what’s possible with digital education and credentialing, challenging education leaders to stay abreast of the curve. If institutions of higher learning can keep developing their applications and offerings in a way that will truly benefit students, an increasing number of future employees can be funneled into their respective fields of expertise.

Digital Credentialing: The Bigger Picture

Digital credentials are an essential component in the mission to help learners assert their skills in a way that’s impactful in the modern workforce. By orienting teaching, learning, skilling, and credentialing models to capture and validate competency at different levels, we can create more throughput routes from the education sector to different work fields. That’s without neglecting individuals who have followed alternative, flexible, or unique academic and upskilling channels.

One of the major goals of digital learning, skills acquisition, and credentialing is to ensure that every student is guided along sensible pathways that align with their respective experience, exposure, and potential — no student gets left behind.

The Evolution of Digital Credentials: Emerging Trends and Useful Insights

Digital credentials allow us to imagine far-reaching student capabilities, skills, and potential, surpassing hardcopy transcripts and paper diplomas. In the next five years, we should be gearing toward stepping into a higher education landscape where there are seamless, digital-led transitions from study to work.

Weaver emphasizes the power of data in reshaping how microcredentials, badges, and alternative credentials are applied in the practical recruitment process. If these flexible awards can be made part of official, widely-recognized academic transcripts and records, we could see a complete shift in the validation and verification of skills and expertise. “Institutions need to think about how to adopt microcredentials and digital badges,” says Weaver, with a special focus on data organization, credential presentation, and verification accuracy.

Digital-first platforms like Google Learning, edX, Coursera, and LinkedIn Learning prove how lucrative e-learning is; digital credentialing feeds into these innovative mechanisms effortlessly. “These providers are delivering very meaningful content in more accessible ways for learners, outside of traditional education,” notes Weaver. This promises great potential for the continued evolution of digital education and credentialing in the coming years.

Addressing Urgent Credentialing Needs: Areas of Immediate Focus

For Weaver, one of the biggest digital credentialing challenges for students, educators, higher education professionals, and other stakeholders across education, government, workforce, and private sectors is how to present professional development alongside uncompromised digital access. Students need to build solid records that fully attest to their acquired and transferable skills.

“We’ve really thought about what kind of container [or format] best represents a student’s academic journey,” recalls Weaver. “The digital badge has a portable container, but it’s not well recognized by verifiers yet.”

This is a vital area of improvement over the next five years, where developments must include a sustainable method of ensuring digital badges exist in portable containers of quick, easy, recognized skills verification. There are two main options: either extending the traditional academic transcript or adopting a completely new type of academic record that’s more inclusive and holistic.

As we look ahead, Weaver confirms that an innovative credentialing system will “capture the holistic earnings of [students’] academic experience.” This experience will be reflected to potential employers and serve as part of official institutional records. Other worthy innovations include:

Better visual curations and representation options for students with multiple digital badges.
Extended digital credentials and opportunities.
Creating a stronger, more inclusive economy of information exchange.
Ensuring closer workplace collaborations and employment connections.

The Rise of Digital Credentialing: Anticipating a Brighter Future

The latest insights and emerging digital credentialing trends are mostly geared toward a greater adoption of new, flexible standards over time. “We want to make sure that institutions and learners are empowered in the ways that align with verifiers’ expectations and requirements,” says Weaver.

The big digital credentialing vision entails adjusting the current student learning experiences to better align with skills assessment and validation metrics, while catering to the needs of employers and student prospects. Today’s workforce opportunities require more than just a traditional academic record. There’s a push to prove skill, workplace readiness, and work orientation.

“As a sector, I think where we’re moving toward broader skills orientation and skills-based hiring,” remarks Weaver. Both digital education and digital credentialing answer that need really well, where every credit a student has accumulated can be acknowledged as legitimate and applicable prior learning.

“Institutions are starting to think about how to scale their credit evaluation for prior learning,” notes Weaver. This casts a wide net of possibilities for enhancing the processes and workflows associated with how institutions develop future workers.

Catch our full podcast episode here; discover more insights about the exciting shifts post-schooling candidates will experience with creative, tech-driven digital solutions.