The Last Mile Challenge

Ed3 organizations, thinkers, and builders are working hard to make it easy to:

• Issue credentials
• Earn credentials
• Store credentials
• Share credentials
• Spend credentials

The Learning Economy's monthly steering meeting today gathered like-minded supporters of ed3 from organizations ranging from LinkedIn to higher ed to edtech start-ups.

The clear takeaway is the technology is there. The core elements are built out or soon to be live and integrated as 101.xyz shows. The whitepaper A National Learning and Employment Records Infrastructure from Central New Mexico Community College, IBM, Western Governors University, Randa, Public Consulting Group, and Solutions for Information Design dives deep into this infrastructure.

The challenge is employers actually accepting or basing hiring and promotion decisions on verifiable credential/badges.

This challenge is echoed by the Digital Credential Consortium's Digital Credentials Consortium Report:

...employers see potential value in using digital credentials for a number of different reasons...adoption remains limited. Our conversations indicate that there is no one obstacle whose removal would suddenly supercharge digital credential adoption. Rather limited adoption is a function of a complex set of economic, political, technical and cultural factors.

The greatest challenge for ed3 is to ship and find product market fit.

It's possible as reports like this one on micro-credentials in the UK shows. It's fun to build but it's time to market test the tooling we have and help employers learn how verifiable credentials can solve the talent gap.