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Degreed: The Startup Trying to Change How We Think About Lifelong Learning

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College degrees hold enormous weight and provide context about an individual’s experience.

Degreed, a Silicon Valley education startup that won the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Competition hosted by the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to shake up how we think about lifelong learning and education credentials.

"I can say I graduated from Brigham Young University in economics with a 3.9 GPA in about 10 seconds and you have an enormous context for what I mean," said David Blake, CEO of Degreed.

"Similarly, there's great power, great signal if I tell you that I read The Economist daily and you tell me you read The Chronicle of Higher Education daily."

The company’s mission—"get credit for lifelong learning"—follows trends in higher education of breaking from long-held big units, like the credit hour, toward more modular approaches to learning, like certificate programs and ad-hoc courses.

Check out our interview with David Blake below.

CLN: Can you give us an idea of what you do at Degreed and how it aims to shake up higher education?

David: Our mission at Degreed is to jailbreak the degree, which is where that verbiage comes from. When we talk about it, it really is this concept of being more inclusive of our learning, and right now, when you ask anyone: Tell me about your education. They will inevitably tell you what degree they got, or where they went to university. But college and university really is the only tool and credential we have to communicate learning.

So when we say 'jailbreak the degree,' we're talking about a more modular approach, the ability to capture everything you do to learn, both inside academia and university as well as professionally as well as informally, and being able to measure it all comprehensively and holistically.

CLN: Degrees are often awarded based on the number of credit hours a student accrues. The idea was introduced more than a century ago, and it's been the go-to credential to determine if someone does or does not earn a college degree. Are we seeing a change of heart in how we structure and credential college education and college degrees?

David: Yeah, I think definitely. Proof of that is the shift toward competency-based education. Western Governor's University is really the pioneer there. We've seen both the emergence of new universities along the competency-based model as well a sea change of credit hour universities shifting toward the competency model.

So I think the interest is definitely there. Further, we're seeing huge growth in executive ed, in certificate programs, universities that traditionally had nothing outside full-degree programs are beginning to offer ad-hoc courses and certificate programs—non-degree learning.

CLN: You're talking about the certificates there and that's a big shift we've been seeing. A lot of the colleges and universities that come to our events are offering those certificate programs. Can you talk about the move away from the traditional degree and how the certification model fits in to what you're doing at Degreed?

David: We're really encouraging and like to see that shift. In part because measuring the world's learning is a difficult chore and undertaking, so as the actual universities and educational providers do package up their offerings in more modular approaches, it is actually facilitating the ability to be inclusive of everything that is measured on Degreed.

Further, for the students, it's also very enabling. We live in a world where the knowledge base is shifting very rapidly. The fill your learning well so you can draw on it for the next 30-40 years model is going away. We're shifting toward the need for that real-time on-demand learning, and I think breaking down from these big units into these smaller units is a great shift, not only for the universities—the ability to have an ad hoc more flexible set of offerings.

I think we will see the demand continue to grow there. It's great for the students because it gives them a more flexible approach. It's meeting the needs that the economy demands of us, and it's great for our mission to be able to measure all of this.

CLN: I was looking at your profile on Degreed and seeing all of the different things you can account for as part of this approach toward lifelong learning. We've talked about the traditional college degree, certification programs, ad-hoc classes you're taking, but I also noticed things as simple as articles you've read on a specific topic can really be foundational to your knowledge in a certain area. Can you talk about the other things that are getting pulled into this global approach to learning?

David: So first, articles, videos, books, papers, research papers, events, conferences, open badges, training, professional certificates, experiential learning, and university courses, those are all there or will be there shortly, and yet that isn't the end of the list.

We're still categorically looking at things like language learning; we still have progress to go on the professional certificate side. And I'd say, further, people are sometimes surprised when you step from a four-year degree that is a huge undertaking and a very large accomplishment and go all the way down to an article, it feels arbitrary and asinine to think that reading a singular New York Times article is somehow material to my education, to which I would largely agree.

When you think about credentials, they are a signal, and they carry with them an enormous amount of context. I can say I graduated from Brigham Young University in economics with a 3.9 GPA. I can say it in about 10 seconds and you have an enormous context for what I mean. It carries an enormous signal with it. Similarly, there's great power, great signal if I tell you that I read The Economist daily and you tell me you read The Chronicle of Higher Education daily—that carries with it quite similarly an enormous amount of context, a pretty strong signal and it is really quite informing of who you are, what your interests are, what you're staying fresh around.

So we believe, even the small things, when aggregated up, as we do our job well, there is a lot of signal and power in aggregating the small things up and breaking the big things down into these more modular micro-credentials.

CLN: The other area we cover at CLN is corporate learning. You would fall under the vein of the learning record store, a big discussion point in corporate learning. We've already talked about the move for colleges to offer more certificates; there's this move now in corporate learning to not just assess what you're getting from the LMS but what you're also getting from other sources. Taking all of that into account, is the idea of this accounting for lifelong education something that's getting more attention and weight right now?

David: I would say definitely so. The learning record store, it's becoming a buzzword. It's been around for a while, but it's surfacing as a topic and an area of focus in attention and innovation now. Historically, that concept of a learning record store still lived inside an LMS or outside as a learning record store, but in a siloed environment.

It was my employer and a corporate training program that had a learning record store. The shift we're seeing is the siloed walls are coming down, and so the concept of our ability and the breadth of what we can gather is becoming holistic. That's the vision of Degreed: to be your learning record store that spans all silos, all systems, all staged of your life to be able to gather it all into a comprehensive record of your lifelong learning.


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