On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, host Amrit Ahluwalia was joined by Carissa Little and Ronie Shilo to discuss enhancing clarity and cohesion for learners and institutions by establishing common taxonomies that streamline the credentialing experience
On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, host Amrit Ahluwalia was joined by Carissa Little and Ronie Shilo to discuss enhancing clarity and cohesion for learners and institutions by establishing common taxonomies that streamline the credentialing experience
Voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. On today’s episode, we speak with Carissa Little, who is Associate Dean of Global and Online Education at Stanford University. Joined with Carissa is Ronie Shilo, who is Managing Director of Programs Strategy and Development at Stanford University. Carissa, Ronie and podcast host Amrit Ahluwalia discuss enhancing clarity and cohesion for learners and institutions by establishing common taxonomies that streamline the credentialing experience
Amrit Ahluwalia: Roni and Carissa, welcome to the Illumination Podcast. Thank you guys so much for taking the time out.
Ronie Shilo (00:39):Thank you. We're happy to be here.
Amrit Ahluwalia (00:41):Absolutely. So we're live in Washington dc we're at the SIA Acro Convergence Conference, and you guys have done some really interesting work as it relates to creating an institution wide, or at least a broad approach to Microcredentials and non-degree credentialing. What inspired the team at SCPD to develop and launch the Stanford credential framework?
Ronie Shilo (01:03):Yeah, I think coming out of the massive open and online courses era, there was a proliferation of digital documents being issued, not just at Stanford but in other places for various types of learning experiences. And Stanford had a handful of committees, I was on two of them who were looking into what should the university be doing to rationalize our longstanding non-credit offerings and take on thinking about what this new MOOC era means for credentials. So that was the catalyst for it, and we actually spent the better part of two years going around the university in partnership with the university registrar, a meeting with every school and all of the units that had substantial activity to make sure that anything that we did incorporated their perspectives, their learning experiences, and programmatic activity in a way that made sense for the institution. And I think the key to that was what we learned was how important it was to relate what we were doing to credit, because that was to degrees and credit, because that's an understood framework that already existed.
Amrit Ahluwalia (02:27):That's so interesting you have.
Carissa Little (02:29):Yeah, I mean, I think that because there were so many different types of credentials being issued by different entities across campus, and Stanford is a very, very decentralized place. We wanted to have a rationale and some kind of organizing framework that would allow first and foremost the learners to make sense of what they're getting and why they're getting different things. But also for the institution kind of thinking about the different units, how do they relate to each other, how do we make sense of different types of documents that are being issued across the campus and not degrade the value of these from the learner's perspective so that we don't have a situation where one unit is issuing something that's very advanced for something that a different unit would issue a much lower level type of credential.
Amrit Ahluwalia (03:22):Absolutely. I mean, the work around creating common taxonomies is so valuable because at the end of the day it speaks to employer valuation, student valuation, and the institution's own conception of what different kinds of credentials mean. Did you find that folks on campus were sort of ready and willing to undertake this process or to get involved with this process? Or what did it really take to create buy-in for the framework?
Ronie Shilo (03:53):Shuttle diplomacy. So running around campus, meeting with many different stakeholders, iterating and incorporating their feedback into the thinking, coming back to them and saying, does this resonate? Does it work for you? And I think one of the keys with where we landed with the framework and getting it sort of approved by the faculty senate subcommittees was this process, but also ensuring that the schools and departments had some level of autonomy within some guideposts for each level of the framework so that they could determine their own levels of rigor and assessment within some guideposts. I think because universities are so decentralized, the notion that this is something that could have school and department level controls versus a centralized entity set of controls has been really important. I also think that providing toolkits to make it easy for units to do the right thing to come and ask the questions.
(04:55):So far we've had lots of interest across the institution where some administrative unit is trying to do something on behalf of a faculty member and they just want to know what the right thing to do is and have a tool to do it. So we haven't really faced resistance. I would say in the beginning there was maybe some resistance when the perception was that there would be some top-down thing that everybody would have to conform to and it wouldn't provide school school level autonomy and flexibility. So built into the framework is some flexibility around requirements at each level. You were very involved in that. Ronnie, do you want to add
Carissa Little (05:33):Anything? Yeah, we tried very hard to look at what are some of the ways to reflect rigor. So as a whole, the framework follows and kind of increased level of rigor as you get through different types of credentials. So there's this credential that's called a certificate of completion, a certificate of achievement, a profession. So with every kind of step on this ladder you require or the university requires more rigor, but different schools may think of rigor in different ways or different departments or faculty. So it could be that there's a very important for, it might be very important for a particular school to say, we don't think rigor can be achieved without contact, direct contact with faculty members, impossible. So we are going to assign that kind of activity a very high value in our thinking about it. And whereas another school might say No, for us it's about number of learning hours and the types of assessments that are being used. So of course there is a lot of commonality in what schools in the end think about, but we've tried to provide that level of flexibility, and I think that gave school a much higher level of comfort in adopting the framework.
Amrit Ahluwalia (06:54):That's so interesting. And for what it's worth, I appreciated clarification on shuttle diplomacy because what I heard was shovel diplomacy, which I have to assume would be very different. That would be very different. So now that the framework is live, what have been some of the early wins that you've seen since launching it, and how do you expect to see the framework evolve maybe over the next five or so years?
Ronie Shilo (07:23):Yeah, that's a great question. So I think some big wins have been that we have a lot of folks coming to us asking us, Hey, I want to do a thing. What's the right credential to issue? And we haven't experienced any resistance to the advice and guidance that we're providing. Not everyone is coming to us, right? It's sure people are still printing things out at their desk and issuing documents. It happens, but at all institutions, but those that have come forward, we haven't faced resistance because it makes sense. It's a rational framework, it is transparent to the learner, and once we walk through those items, it's important. I think the next phase for us. So we've already, we just recently implemented issuing all of these
Ronie Shilo (08:14):On the blockchain, and there are some learning outcomes that are associated with these credentials. I think making that more robust in terms of describing better to the learner and ultimately to employers, the more detail behind that, potentially having e-portfolios be associated with certain levels of the credential framework would be some future goals that we might have.
Carissa Little (08:42):Yeah, I think another future aspiration that we have, the credential does allow for stackability and pathways between non-credit activities and credit bearing activities. So that's built into the framework. However, it has not been adopted at Stanford in the sense that it's not currently happening,
At least not in a robust way. And so that certainly for us is a goal. Again, the framework has kind of was visionary and forward facing in that it definitely allows for that, but it's not actually happening. So I certainly hope that we'll be able to see more examples of where we can cross that threshold and allow for credit to be issued. For non-credit, what currently is not credit bearing experiences?
Amrit Ahluwalia (09:32):Well, and I think there's something to building something that the institution can grow into as opposed to building something and then needing to evolve it actively. Creating a level of comfort with a common taxonomy doesn't necessarily, there isn't a need for stackability today, but the fact that it can grow into something stackable means as folks get comfortable with the first phase, the second phase is accessible to them, that is a really exciting option. I am curious, you mentioned that the credentials are blockchain. Blockchain managed obviously a long time partnership with Modern campus at SCPD BC diploma is supporting some of the digital credentialing work you're doing. How are those partnerships helping to streamline the work that's happening around the credential framework?
Ronie Shilo (10:20):Oh, it's incredible. I mean, even though we were issuing digital documents previously, it's all automated now through our partnership with Modern Campus and BC diploma has been fantastic. I think the other piece is that the learners themselves now have ownership over their records. So they can post them on LinkedIn, they can send their employer directly to that badge or credential. The employer can click on it and get more detail about what it is, what it means. So the learner owns their record. I don't think learners appreciate yet how important that is, although they appreciate being able to post it on their LinkedIn and have it be verified on the blockchain. But that that's part of our future goal is building out in a more robust way, those learning outcomes. They're there, but we want to build them out in a more robust way so that employers and learners get even more out of those digital credentials.
Amrit Ahluwalia (11:18):Absolutely. You know what interests me when we start talking about the learner experience, especially as it relates to learner own credentials and learning records, is for the learner themselves, they see it as a standard experience in almost every other industry. They've worked to figure out how to make the consumer really the owner of their experience, the owner of their record, being able to manage their own record. If you're working with, say, an airline is a perfect example, it would be unconscionable if you had to get a receipt to then call to go to an office. But in higher education, we're very comfortable creating that experience for our learners.
Amrit Ahluwalia: So I've always wondered, when you think about those elements of efficiency, those elements of streamlining the student experience, how much of it do they actually recognize and how much of it is just critical to deliver as part of meeting their expectations?
Ronie Shilo (12:19):That's a great question. I think it's the latter. And I think that institutions like Stanford are held to an even higher set of expectations from learners. Of course, you should be able to do this because United Airlines can do it, so you should be able to do it too. All that said, I think that the technology stack that institutions of higher ed have to navigate in these very decentralized environments, it's difficult to make all of that work well and seamlessly for students, which is why our partnership with modern campus and BC diploma have been essential to us being able to, for many parts of our learning journey for students to make it a better experience.
Carissa Little (13:12):Yeah. I think one thing kind of tying this notion of the digital badging and credentialing to the question of adoption of the framework across campus, I feel like we're at some kind of an inflection point across campus where groups that previously were happy printing a certificate out of their desk, the learners don't want that anymore. They want the badge, they want the digital credential. And so suddenly we are seeing, and I think we're going to see a lot more of it groups from across campus coming to us and say, can you help us with the issuing of this credential? And what that does is it does, I think over time will really help us align if we take advantage of this opportunity, align the entire campus with the framework. Because really now, or the other thing that could happen is this also could become decentralized, where now different units establish their own relationships with the variety of vendors and we'll see a decentralized approach evolve. So I do think there's a moment here that it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds.
Amrit Ahluwalia (14:22):Well, I mean, it's certainly a fascinating time and I'm excited to keep up with you guys and see how it continues to evolve. It more or less does it on my end. And I'll tell you, this is the part of the interview where we switch gears a little bit from being a higher ed podcast to a food podcast.
Amrit Ahluwalia (14:38):If someone's out to dinner in Palo Alto, where do they need to go?
Ronie Shilo (14:43):Would Sayan is an Indian fusion restaurant that is stellar. The environment is stellar, the food is super creative. You get sort of somewhat traditional Indian dishes with a very dramatic twist. You might get octopus in grilled octopus with cummin and Indian spices, or you might take a traditional Indian bread and stuff with something that's completely non-traditional. It's incredible. Their cocktails are also excellent and very creative. So that would be my pick.
Carissa Little (15:25):So I actually surprisingly live in Maryland, so I have not gone out to dinner in Palo Alto for quite a while. But
Amrit Ahluwalia (15:35):I'm assuming in or around Baltimore?
Carissa Little (15:37):Well, around DC I live in Rockville. Yeah.
Amrit Ahluwalia (15:39):So if someone's going to dinner in DC or Rockville, where do they need to go? So
Carissa Little (15:43):One of my favorite places in DC is the Diplomat, which is a French. It has a lot of atmosphere to, it really looks like a French restaurant bistro, and very good food. So they have very good seafood and just a great atmosphere.
Amrit Ahluwalia (16:02):Fantastic. Well guys, hey, I appreciate you taking time out of your conference. Thank you so much for joining me.
Voiceover: This podcast is made possible by a partnership between Modern Campus and the evolution. The modern campus engagement platform powers solutions for non-traditional student management, web content management, catalog and curriculum management, student engagement and development, conversational text messaging, career pathways, and campus maps and virtual tours. The result, innovative institutions can create Learner to Earner Lifecycle that engages modern learners for life, while providing modern administrators with the tools needed to streamline workflows and drive high efficiency. To learn more and to find out how to modernize your campus, visit modern campus.com. That's modern campus.com.