Credentialate features - prepare for the skills economy
For educators to remain competitive in a diverse marketplace - one increasingly crowded with smaller, more agile competitors - micro-credentials and digital badges have found themselves at the forefront of the new skills economy. This requires a shift in how traditional institutions approach which fields of study, courses and course content to offer. Education offerings today need to be developed with backwards-design thinking. Start with the skills and competencies employers want, align them to micro-credentials that teach them, then provide credible evidence of learning that can be quickly verified.
More and more, learners want the flexibility and portability of digital badges to share evidence of their achievements. They seek ways to integrate their non-formal and formal education, and need centralised storage and management of their credentials to differentiate themselves in job markets effectively.
The power of Credentialate, lies in its ability to:
- Collect and aggregate learner data from multiple sources into a centralised system
- Align data to in-demand skills and competencies, frameworks and labour market data
- Issue a personalised evidence record with qualitative and quantitative detail
- Track and manage competency achievement outside of course silos
More than that, Credentialate:
- Utilises automation and templates to reduce human workload and enable scale workload
- Integrates non-formal and formal education into a single, framework-aligned evidence record
- Reduces the time and cost of launching skills-based micro-credentials
Introducing Credentialate
A brief overview
How Credentialate works
Evaluate
Credentialate connects to Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and assessment platforms to capture learner performance data. It assesses competency achievement against an institution’s models to determine learners’ levels of mastery
Credentialate
Credentialate uses automation to collect and aggregate learning data, then issues digital badges via leading badge providers. Educators can issue, track and manage attainment of competencies from a single cloud-based platform
Validate
Credentialate creates a verifiable Evidence Record with qualitative and quantitative personalised evidence of an individual learner’s achievements. Learners can share evidence of their capabilties and build towards Mastery of sought-after workplace skills and comptencies
Skills-first evidence alignment
Traditionally, digital credentials reference only their generic earning criteria. With Credentialate, the world’s first Credential Evidence Platform, education providers can include a personalised evidence page with qualitative and quantitative detail of achievement.Now, Credentialate has developed Skills-First Evidence Alignment, in recognition and support of the burgeoning skills economy, as a way for education providers to apply backwards-design to micro-credential development.
Credentialate integrates with
Use cases
Multi-campus Higher Education Provider
Our client is an applied higher education institution with more than 20,000 students spread across multiple campuses in the Middle East. The health sciences field is rapidly emerging as one of our client’s largest strategic growth areas, offering bachelor, high diploma and diploma courses to students. Learning takes place in classrooms, laboratories, clinics and hospital settings where the experiential learning provides the knowledge, skills, competencies, attitudes and behaviours required of a modern health sciences professional.
Our client advocates student success by providing globally recognised credentials for soft skills that traditionally have no accreditation. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the institution with numerous opportunities for change and development and they are now seeking to move their health sciences curriculum from outcomes-based courses to skills-based courses. Their 50-year vision sees a student journey that encompasses the acquisition of formal and non formal skills-based learning and links academic achievement with global skills standards and labour market requirements.
Many modern learning management systems (LMSs) have badge-issuing capabilities, but none offer the capability to issue globally recognised micro-credentials and supporting evidence records from course rubrics and grade book item data. Credentialate’s ability to translate LMS course competencies into micro-credential awards for skills-based learning has seen the platform take a cornerstone role in our client’s 50-year curriculum re-structuring and development plan.
Working with our client, Edalex integrated Credentialate with the institution’s Blackboard LMS and imported sample course, grade book item and student grade data. We assisted our client in creating evidence matrix rubrics to define competencies and assign Blackboard grade book items to competency elements. Our talented team of designers crafted individually branded badges that demonstrated the digital awards a student would receive on achieving the Credentialate credentials defined for their course. Our client now has a fully integrated and operational personalised micro-credential evidence platform and are moving forward towards the strategic goals of their 50 year vision plan.
Vocational Educator
Our client is a vocational education and training provider with over 100,000 learners enrolled nationally and overseas across 50 locations. Continuing changes in the workplace, adoption of new occupational technologies and the COVID-19 global pandemic have highlighted the vital role our client plays in building the skills of the future and existing workforce. In 2020 our client innovated new products in the VET marketplace that included recognition of micro-credentials and skill sets, giving learners avenues by which to quickly build on their existing skills or retrain in new and emerging areas.
Our client’s 2020-2021 strategic direction included launching a series of micro-credentials, looking to capitalise on the ongoing evolution in education, react rapidly to industry demand for skills, leverage Queensland funding and ultimately deliver on the needs of their learners. They identified Credentialate as the ideal partner platform and collaborated with Edalex to scope the requirements for their skills recognition and micro-credentialing strategy.
Edalex conducted a series of workshops to help our client define their objectives, desired learner experience, micro-credential lifecycle and LMS, SMS, enrolment, authentication and associated systems integration plan. Edalex’s Micro-credential Maturity Model was used to help shape the discussion and evaluate various aspects of the project. A phased rollout model was recommended to support scope control, incorporation of learnings, feedback cycles and the evolution of our client’s micro-credential offerings over time.
In April 2021 our client’s instance of Credentialate went live, issuing micro-credential badges for skills-based competencies and are well on their way to achieving their 2020-2021 strategic goals. Edalex continues to develop Credentialate in partnership with our client to ensure their continuing access to the most innovative, best-in-class tools, and have recently upgraded the platform with Skills and Competency Library functionality.
Registered Training Organisation
Our client is the largest organisation of its kind in Australia and a prominent member of a worldwide volunteer-based organisation for providing young Australians, of all ages, genders, and abilities, with challenging and adventurous opportunities to advance personal growth. Our client formally registered as an RTO training organisation and offers vocational qualifications from Certificate II through to Diplomas at no cost to its members.
Units of competency can be undertaken at any stage during a member’s journey within the organisation and are not necessarily completed sequentially - competencies from courses and certifications can be cherry-picked as required. Tracking each member’s progress and qualifications can be done at national and regional levels, however it is very difficult to validate a member’s qualifications locally and immediately - particularly when the member is travelling interstate. For governance and regulation compliance purposes, our client needed to find a way to recognise and share their learner’s credentials throughout the organisation and make these credentials accessible to the learner for sharing when proof of qualifications is required. To assist with internal auditing, our client also required a system that was the ‘single source of truth’ from which learners and credential data could be extracted for performance metric analysis.
Credentialate is the perfect solution for our client, because the platform is specifically designed to recognise learner competency and award instantly verifiable credentials supported by evidence records. Working with our client, we designed evidence matrix rubrics from their course content and created competencies and custom badges to award achievement of the competency elements described. Learners benefit from the ability to securely access and share their personalised evidence records and badges online to prove or promote their achievements. Our client benefits from a learning management system (LMS) integrated, cloud-based platform that automatically awards credentials and provides real-time access to learner records from anywhere in the world.
Proof of Concept
A good first step for most of the institutions we work with, is to order a free Proof of Concept, which will provide you with a report that can be used as a business case for development of Skills-First Evidence Alignment.
Frequently asked questions
What is personalised evidence?
Credentialate is the world’s first Credential Evidence Platform and currently the only digital badging platform that systematically provides personalised evidence - qualitative and quantitative evidence of learner-level achievement. This level of granular evidence equips the learner to identify, articulate and speak to their unique strengths, especially for learners outside of the top 2%. Our recent market research survey revealed that only 33% of college graduates felt confident of their ability to speak to their strengths and differentiate themselves.
Watch What is Credentialate?
What is an evidence matrix?
Available for the first time through Credentialate, an evidence matrix provides a flexible yet robust framework from which competencies can be created without the need for a rubric. Educators start by creating a competency, then define the competency elements, select one or more gradebook items relevant to the competency elements from the integrated LMS course and add weighting values across gradebook items and/or elements. They can then add a quantitative range of scores and qualitative result descriptions. Digital badges are then issued against the new competency, the same as if it had been created from a rubric.
Schedule a Demo
What is the Skills and Competency Library?
The Skills and Competency Library provides the functionality to create, store, accumulate, use and reuse skills or competency data for digital credentials across an institution. Competencies represent expertise in a particular skill that an organisation wishes to recognise, and could represent transferable skills such as teamwork, domain knowledge such as programming python, or a particular certification. Competencies can be selected from the library to use as templates for digital credentials, streamlining the credential setup process.
Why is alignment to frameworks important?
Coming in October 2021, Credentialate will address this gap between micro-credentials and the world of work by enabling competencies to be aligned to frameworks. Details of the framework association will be displayed within the personalised evidence record, providing a way for employers to more easily understand the learner’s level of skill. Frameworks from all corners of the world can be imported or alternatively, the Edalex team can provide assistance to institutions with framework data and alignment.
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What reporting capabilities does Credentialate have?
- Gain insights into the curriculum planning and management lifecycles
- Surface learning outcomes against skills and competencies
- Identify gaps in skills achievement, supporting the accreditation process
- Identify opportunities to enhance support for at-risk learners
- Track achievements against frameworks across the institution (coming October 2021)
How well will Credentialate integrate with our existing systems?
Credentialate has been designed from the ground up to integrate with existing platforms within education IT ecosystems. Harvesting can occur from leading LMSs and/or other third-party platforms, such as assessment tools.
Download the Credentialate brochure
How does Credentialate use automation?
In Credentialate, harvesting and badge issuing can be scheduled or triggered by external systems - such as the Student Management System (SMS). In turn, Credentialate can provide the SMS with details on earned micro-credentials and evidence pages for inclusion in learner records.
Creating an Industry-Aligned Micro-Credentials Framework
Like the rest of the world, Australia is not immune to the economic, social and technological forces shifting and shaping the need for transformation in post-secondary education. The focus is on building an agile and adaptable workforce with flexible options for skill acquisition. Australia has a national system of qualifications, encompassing higher education, vocational education and training (VET), and school-based education, underpinned by the Australian Qualifications Framework.
In this conference session, the presenters will discuss the development of a robust, industry-aligned and scalable micro-credentials framework.
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We’d love to help you on your micro-credential journey - simply submit your details and we'll make a time to discuss your unique micro-credential journey and what next steps look like for you.
