In this conversation style interview, Dan McFadyen and Nicholas Robert, Co-Founder and CEO of Learning Vault, explore how standards and interoperability are enabling credential curation, dynamic credentials and learner agency.
00:49 – Learning Vault’s Journey and Mission 03:29 – The Digital Credential and Digital Badging Landscape and Drivers of Future Growth 08:06 – How Wider Awareness of Digital Credentials and Adhering to Standards is Supporting Learner Agency 12:28 – The Critical Elements of Truly Portable, Internationally Verifiable Credentials 17:02 – How Lifelong Skills Recognition and Credential Curation is Becoming the New Hiring Signal 23:47 – How Different Sectors and Organisations Credential the Soft and Domain Specific Skills Mix 28:27 – How QVault Maximised Interoperability and Enabled Dynamic Digital Credential Creation 33:53 – Upcoming Projects – Making Skills Accessible and Meaningful to Empower Learners on a Global Scale
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Transcript
(This transcript has been lightly edited for readability)
DM – Look Nicholas, I love that example that you just gave and what I’ve noted was that you blended a range of skills from technical skills to 21st century human skill, soft skills – call them what you will, and that’s what each of us have and need to have to fulfil job responsibilities. I’m curious around your clients today, do they tend to focus on soft skills? Domain specific skills? A blend of the two? And are organisations, are institutions ready – this is a multi-part question for you but I’m really excited – do you think the institutions are ready to certify on 21st century skills as well as domain specific skills?
NR – Look it’s really interesting, and I have to say that it’s different client by client and sector by sector. So what I mean by that is we work with some schools K-12, public private and independent and even within them there’s a mix, so some focus purely on extracurricular activities, some focus purely on the hard results as it were, aligned to the curriculum – the academic results, others do a hybrid. In vocational, we’ve got some fantastic clients that do completely short courses that are largely based towards soft skills and things like that. We do a very large body of work with Box Hill and they’re absolutely fantastic and some private providers – genU, for instance, is doing some incredible work across that micro-credential space. And then we’ve got other organisations that we work with that sort of look at it purely from a skill set perspective or a fully accredited perspective. We’ve got some RTOs that, for instance, will digitally credential their work experience components and the elements that they need to do for some of those qualifications that require minimum hours to be spent in the workforce; and then when we look outside of that, so professional development and industry associations, we do significant bodies of work with those organisations. We have some that digitally certify all of their membership base, so for instance, if they’re an accountant and they’re a chartered member, for instance – they have a 364-day credential that says they’re an active member of this organisation; they have had to do all of these things in order to be a chartered member. We then have others that are sort of like they volunteer time, they do this, they mentor others and you know there’s a credential for all of those soft skills. So it really is quite different and across the entire spectrum. We’re starting to see large industry sectors looking at this to help with staff mobility such as in the Aged Care space, for instance, looking at – yes, the technical skills that a staff member has but also some of the other qualities that they’re looking for in terms of an effective communicator, an effective leader. So internally what that organisation is starting to do is understand what the emerging leadership team looks like and if they need a staff member to transition from one area to another area, what mobility they actually have within their own workforce.
So I know that hasn’t really answered concretely your question, but we’re starting to see the use cases really start to play out across different industry sectors and across different needs.
DM – No I think just hearing that range of responses and ultimately from this, I’m sure you and the team at Learning Vault have developed best practices and are able to guide clients whichever direction they want to take and give them that much more holistic view of: “This is where ultimately – perhaps you should be heading, rather than focusing just on this one narrow area.”
NR – Absolutely to the point where the team is actually broken down a little bit further into sort of like education and then supportive external education. So industry groups, corporate groups, things like that where the nuances are not the same as they are in the education field but can certainly look to understand: “What outcomes are you wanting to achieve? What data is meaningful for you to actually have within a credential and what problem are you trying to solve by using this?” Not just sort of like here it is, turn it on. There’s a lot of that consultation piece, especially because it’s so new as well, being able to actually get the changes that are required from an industry to actually make that change relevant and meaningful for them.
DM – Fantastic. I’d like to circle back to QVault. So one of your newer platforms, you mentioned it earlier, and actually just dovetailing on something that you just flagged around what problem a client is solving. So how is QVault different from your normal digital badging platform? And what problem were you trying to solve here in Australia? And then is it the same problem in the UK or different problems and challenges that you see that delivering on?
NR – No, for sure. So QVault is our verifiable credential product for accredited programs. So the catalyst for that was two-fold. The first one was we started talking to a lot of our clients within the vocation space and a lot of our friends within the vocational space around digital badges, digital credentials, verifiable credentials – all the same word. And they were sort of saying: “Look, they’re great. We just don’t understand how to use them.” So if we issue a digital badge, technically, is ASQA going to be on us for being non-compliant – Do we issue it for a unit of competency? If we issue it for a unit of competency, where do we put the statement of attainment? Or how can we actually legally do this? So there was this big barrier for entry for those groups but as I said, there are some providers that were all like: “Let’s just use it for our non-accredited training and let’s use it for our work experience components and all the rest of it.” We then ran quite an extensive workshop with a few RTOs around… if the future is all around verifiable credentials and agency being with the individual recipient, so the earner, the student, how portable is all of this? And one of the people brought up: “Well seems pretty stupid if they’re getting all of these credentials their whole life but we can’t actually give them one.” And there are a few butchered ways that you could look at doing this. I mean some of the incumbents, for instance, are sort of like you can just put a PDF within the actual badge and it will work. So what we actually decided to do was completely tear apart the standards for interoperability so that we could make sure that interoperability was never compromised, and then how can we extend the standard as much as we can without breaking it to be able to include all of these additional components that would make it relevant under the Australian Qualifications Framework. So we played around with that for a while.
We had a lot of assistance with our good friends at Ready Tech to allow us to integrate with their Student Management System being job ready etc. And we really started to tease around this idea of how can we look at creating a certificate as a verifiable credential. We again went back to some of our RTOs that were part of the pilot group and one RTO was very vocal and she said to me: “Nicholas, we spent three months at a management level getting sign off for the look and feel of our certificate. There’s no way we’re changing it.” And so we just sort of thought: “Look. That’s fair enough. There are other incumbents that have certificate functionality but it’s all template driven.” So how can we make something that’s truly dynamic so it doesn’t really matter what units of competency a student does and it’s literally the same as the certificate that’s produced. So ultimately that’s exactly what we built. So we built what’s called, you’ll understand this more than most Dan, a credential assertion. So pretty much it’s a verifiable credential framework that allows all of these extra pieces of information to be put in and then we bake that as a verifiable credential. So what that means is in your Student Management System, however your certificate looks, whatever your statement of attain- or whatever your record of results looks like, whatever those records are, is actually dynamically brought in and baked as a compliant credential and it’s the same with the statement of attainment. So we’ve literally launched that not too long ago and it’s been able to make verifiable credentials meaningful for Registered Training Organisations in Australia. And it’s actually been able to do the same in the United Kingdom. So it’s only UK awarding authorities are quite similar in terms of there are certain attributes that need to be part of a qualification over there or a statement so we’ve done all of that. Interestingly the AQF has one of the most robust certification structures in the world, which is good, but more importantly what it enables a person to do in that same repository is they can have their full AQF certificate from an RTO. They might have their St John’s ambulance first aid, they might have a refresher for CPR, they might have employee of the month from an Aged Care provider, they might have leadership under pressure – all of these things that they can then curate and send as part of a digital resume or put in machine readable repository. They can actually see exactly where they are and what they’ve done.
DM – Brilliant, brilliant, now that’s fantastic and actually I’m sure very gratifying for you to see the flexibility that it can be extended not just to meet the requirements here in Australia but to the UK and now out to other countries as well. Probably my last question and thank you for all your time and insight so far but you’ve already talked about a lot of exciting and innovative work that you’re doing but I guess is there anything else, what else have you got brewing and what excites you? What gets you out of bed?
NR – The thing that excites me most is all around that piece that I was sort of touching on earlier around the ability to amplify and democratise the transformational potential of knowledge and learning and being able to actually have that manifestation throughout a person’s life. We’re starting to work with some pretty exciting organisations, some that I can’t talk about. So they may or may not be around government and things like that, either foreign or domestic. But really starting to look at how we can solve problems relating to the employment market by being able to make the knowledge someone has gained portable and accessible and machine readable. And part of that – like just to unplug, unpack something further is – let’s just say, we’re working with an organisation and they have complex needs and maybe they have minimum requirements for staff to be deployed to particular areas. And they currently have a system where they need to go through and actually look at each individual record of results within a qualification to sort of say: “Okay – this person did elective group here but they need to do this particular unit here for us to be able to send them to that area over there.” One of the projects I’m very excited on, that we may or may not be working with Edalex upon, is how we can make that data meaningful and solve a real world problem for a very large organisation around mobility. And making sure that the right people are certified in the right way to be present and interacting with other people, where they need to be. It’s that whole piece around making data accessible and meaningful so that people can interact with and make the right decisions at the right moments in time which I think is very important.
DM – Brilliant, brilliant. Excellent and I’m sure there’s more to come when the time is right. Well look Nicholas, thank you so much for our discussion today. It’s amazing hearing your perspective around the technology but very importantly not forgetting who this is for – for that learner, for the earner who’s receiving these and what that enables is, as you said, the democratisation potential there and ultimately the impact that you and other providers can have on individuals and help transform their lives and create new opportunities based on skills, based on their own achievements.
NR – Absolutely and I mean, just one last point before I finish because you’ve just made me think about it Dan. I think it’s often too overlooked that the student in this whole piece – the recipient, the person that’s there. We’re doing a large – potentially doing a large body of work with a foreign government and what’s really brought to the front of this is mobility of knowledge and being able to have verifiable pieces of knowledge. Obviously the conflict overseas is horrible, any conflict in any country is horrible. But when we look at that as a microcosm, there was a mass exodus of people uh in a way that was unplanned. And that migration event meant that everybody just fled. So when they relocated in other parts, as you would, there’s no ability to discern whether somebody has a degree, whether somebody has skills in a particular area, and so therefore employability becomes really complex when you’re relying on somebody’s word in front of you. So we’re working potentially with a very large organisation internationally to look at what the standards look like and how everybody can actually have those verifiable credentials stored anywhere and everywhere. And it’s not for the business, it’s not for the RTO, it’s not for the school – it’s for the recipient. It’s being able to make sure that anywhere at any moment in time, you can actually prove all of the knowledge and the skills that you have through a verifiable instrument that’s not dependent upon you saying: “Hey, I got this from this place at this date, just trust me.”
DM – And it’s not paper because we know they fled for their lives so they don’t have…
NR – Sadly it’s very real and that organisation that we’re talking to came to us based off the back of that. And they’re just sort of like: “this is a problem that we need to solve.” But look, the most important part in all of this is being able to understand the entire rounded centred view of the individual and being able to have this entire spectrum of everything that they’ve been able to do and it’s up to them who they choose to share that with. That’s super important. Dan – thank you so much for inviting me to have this conversation with you. It’s been absolutely amazing and I look forward to more things that we do together because we’re tackling some incredible projects that are incredibly meaningful to a lot of people.
DM – Here, here – well thank you so much Nicholas and looking forward to continuing the discussion.
NR – Take care Dan
DM – Thanks
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