Education Design Lab
Learning Designer
Aug 2017- Present
The Education Design Lab's 21st Century Skill Micro-Credentials began as a design challenge to find a way to signal to employers that students have sought after 21st century skills. Report after report is published claiming undergraduates entering the workforce are lacking these essential skills like collaboration, oral communication, and critical thinking.
When I joined the Lab in 2017, they had identified the suite of 8 competencies by working with subject matter experts, employers, and academics. They had even run several successful pilots with universities such as Georgetown and University of Arizona. There was demand from other higher ed institutions that wanted to deploy these micro-credentials, but the process was not yet documented in a way to be shareable.
In April 2018 we released our v1 prototype of the micro-credentials as an open toolkit. This collection of curated links hosted on our website garnered a lot of attention. As of December 2019, over 2,000 individuals signed up to gain access to the toolkit.
While thousands of people were interested in a solution, we only had a handful of active pilots (people who were taking the DIY toolkit content and building out the learning experience themselves). The micro-credentials in canvas make it easy for faculty to 'plug + play' with all of the learning modules built out for them.
