Edalex, the EdTech company powering your single source of truth for skills and learning data, is thrilled to release the results of their Edalex Credentialate Alliance research project and share key findings, outcomes and future implications – including that 76% of learners are more confident speaking about their skills after receiving a personal evidence record
The Global Victoria EdTech Innovation Alliance (GVEIA) program (delivered by EduGrowth and funded by the Victorian Government, Australia) supported partnerships between Victorian EdTech companies and education institutions and connected them with international partners. The Edalex Credentialate Alliance comprised Education Design Lab, a US national nonprofit with deep experience in career pathway visibility, the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne School of Professional and Continuing Education (MSPACE) and the University of Dayton’s Institute of Applied Creativity for Transformation (IACT).
Edalex’s Innovation Sprint aimed to increase learners’ confidence in the expression of their workplace skills by issuing a personal evidence record of the skills they had developed in their studies. This evidence could then be shared with employers, sending a signal to hire or promote by demonstrating their workplace skills.
Key findings on the impact the personal evidence records had on undergraduate student confidence at the University of Dayton include:
- Before being issued with a personal evidence record, 5% of learners reported feeling ‘not at all confident’
- After the personal evidence records were issued:
- 76% felt ‘somewhat’ or ‘significantly more’ confident talking about their skills
- 34% were more likely to be ‘completely confident’ citing an application or using an example to speak about their skills
- 18% were more likely to be ‘completely confident’
- Students were 20% less likely to be only ‘a little bit confident’
- None of students reported feeling ‘not at all confident’
“I think what’s really important about the depth of evidence on the evidence record is that the owner can have confidence in telling their story,” said Brian LaDuca, Executive Director, IACT at the University of Dayton. “It’s something a student or an earner can access and translate and then transfer. And to me, that’s a huge part of this,” he went on to say.
Dan McFadyen, Managing Director of Edalex commented: “This research provided us with proof of the expected efficacy of our Credentialate platform. But what we didn’t expect was the extent of the effectiveness of our solution on increasing learner confidence.” The research study found that learners readily embraced the more detailed information included in the credential – such as a detailed description of the credential components, how learners were assessed and the links out to rich skill descriptors (RSDs) that provided job market context. “Credentialate’s personal evidence record gave learners next-level understanding of what they had learnt and how they could apply it in their careers. They felt informed and empowered, which had an overall 76% of learners had greater confidence in speaking about their skills,” McFadyen enthused.
Employers, too, were very open to the deeper story the evidence records told. “Employers told us that it gave them insight into the learner’s level of human capability. This is particularly valuable in graduate hiring, as it provides independent proof that they’re ready for the workplace, setting them apart from other candidates,” McFadyen continued.
University of Melbourne postgraduate learners found value in the personal evidence record recognising their technical and broader work readiness and the transferability of their skills. All respondents thought the identified and highest rated transferability skills – communications and problem solving – were valued as much as their technical skills as rated on a continuum of importance. Based on the results from the learner surveys, Josephine Lang, Academic Director Educational Innovation affirmed: “The outcomes of this project, and our next phase of implementation, will likely underpin recommendations we subsequently make to Chancellery about what the University could or perhaps should consider in the broader micro-credential ecosystem moving forward.”
Other outcomes from the research include:
- Credentialate delivered benefits to all stakeholders when intersecting digital micro-credential and skills ecosystems: learners, employers and universities
- Learners valued that they could apply their developed skills during their micro-credential assessment and found the Learner Evidence Record was useful in representing their skills to others
- University providers found using Credentialate facilitated improvement in curriculum design and development by explicitly aligning curriculum and assessment with skills
- Employers reported that the embedded artefacts improved employment processes and they were able to identify the skills in their workforce that required upskilling.
Naomi Boyer, PhD, Executive Director of Digital Transformation at Education Design Lab, says: “The global, cross-institutional collaboration of this work provides significant insights into the value of skill validation and documentation to learner-earners and employers in connecting stakeholders across the talent pipeline, regardless of geographic location, area of study, and level of education. The Credentialate platform elevated and facilitated processes that previously could not be scaled due to a lack of digital tools and served as a catalyst to intercontinental innovation”.
The research project provided the opportunity to share knowledge and practice across providers and EdTechs and generate new ways of working in the emerging areas of micro-credential and skills ecosystems. The insights from the research will be used to inform future policy around skill transparency and personal evidence, and their benefits to participants in the learner/earner ecosystem.
The full research report whitepaper will be released in March 2023.
Find out more about Credentialate at https://www.edalex.com/credentialate
Media Contact
Kristine Chompff
Marketing Manager for Edalex
+61 409 598 408
kristine.chompff@edalex.com
About Edalex
Powering your single source of truth for skills and learning data
Edalex is an EdTech company powering your single source of truth for skills and learning data. Founded in 2016, Edalex develops technology solutions that extract hidden value from educational data to make it accessible and more meaningful. Edalex brings together the team behind the CODiE award-winning openEQUELLA open source platform that centrally houses teaching and learning, research, media and library content.
In 2019, Edalex launched Credentialate, the world’s first Credential Evidence Platform, that helps discover and share evidence of workplace skills. Credentialate creates order from chaotic data, provides meaningful insight through framework alignment and equips each learner with unique, rich, industry-aligned evidence of their skills and competencies. Credentialate has continued to evolve at an accelerated pace, informed in partnership with educators and industry leaders from around the world.
openRSD was released by Edalex in 2022 to help create, store and share rich skill descriptors (RSDs) and RSD collections. openRSD uses Edalex’s open source technology stack to create locally- and globally-relevant libraries of RSDs that are open to all contributors and consumers. RSDs are the building blocks of a skills-driven labour market. They structure skills data, add context around a particular skill and are both human and machine readable. RSDs bring equity to the learner and the skills ecosystem and provide an even playing field for skills recognition.
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