The Digital Credentials Lab
Overview:
I took the initiative to identify market opportunities and potential entry points for higher education to enter the digital badging and microcredentials space. I designed and executed multiple pilot programs to assess interest, adoption rates, and to define the desired learning experiences.
The university formed a team with members from various disciplines, and our mission was to explore the potential of microcredentials. We were responsible for not only identifying this opportunity but also conducting trials with learners. Microcredentials, as we defined them, are smaller learning achievements that result in a verifiable certificate showing specific skills and knowledge. My role specifically involved conducting research on the market and competitors, creating user-friendly guidelines based on user feedback, and supporting the trials by specifying the requirements for the learning experience and designing user-friendly interfaces.
The university's goal in delving into microcredentials was to reach a broader audience: people who couldn't pursue a traditional higher education degree due to various life constraints or goals that didn't require a degree.
Even before the pandemic, our team noticed signs in the market indicating an upcoming wave of automation and AI-supported work. We anticipated that there would be a nationwide need for people to acquire new skills and retrain for different jobs. Our focus was on front-line employees from various industries who didn't have higher education degrees but needed opportunities to enhance their skills and adapt to changes in the job market.
The Opportunity & Solutions
My Challenge:
To identify and define opportunities for microcredentials from a higher education provider, to run pilots to prove the model, and to conduct user research to deeply understand user needs, resulting in a go-to-market strategy.
You Are Not Your User
One of the first obstacles the team and I encountered is that not only were we not our users, we were all individuals with multiple college degrees and people that the higher education system had served well. In order to understand the people we were designing for, we partnered with Storyline to conduct nationwide user interviews with frontline workers across multiple industries and the hiring managers who hired them. From truckers out of the mid-west to Uber drivers in Silicon Valley, we asked people how they learn today, what they want to learn, and how they thought their jobs might change in the near future. We discovered their barriers to seeking education and learned that beyond pricing, the modality through which they learn and the support along the way were major opportunities.
I worked very closely with Storyline to synthesize findings and uncover key themes. I then led in the prioritization of those requirements as part of the go-to-market strategy.
Early Pilots
We partnered across the university to run pilots in existing programs, aimed at helping us understand the tech stack available to us, the internal processes of awarding badges, the level of engagement by learners and the support they needed to be successful, and the adoption of the badges by users. These early pilots yielded significant findings that we applied in later pilots, including identifying the need for a more engaging and simple UI in the platform(s), the need to allow learners to work at their own pace and easily access support, and the surprising discovery that the resulting badge and University name meant far less to learners than the direct connection between outcomes and their career paths.
Later pilots emphasized the employer connection, working directly in partnership with major nationwide employers to design outcomes, offered more autonomy to the learner in how and what they learned, and were built on platforms that enabled us to build a more delightful and engaging UI.
Defining the Opportunity
I did an analysis of over 60 competitors in the space, from training providers to bootcamps, colleges already offering microcredentials to large employers with upskilling programs. At the same time, I also conducted interviews with experts in both industry and higher education to gather and synthesize their findings.
Despite the abundance of players in the space, I identified an opportunity to enter the market as a low-cost higher education provider. At the time, most of the higher education competitors offered only costly programs, while cheaper alternatives didn’t offer the reputation and validity that a college could provide.
Deeper research found significant opportunity in the IT and healthcare industries. Both industries were growing rapidly (or would in the next few years), had a labor shortage, and did not require college degrees for entry-level roles. Additionally, at the time we predicted that both of these industries would be changing rapidly with the broad adoption of automation and AI and would require their employees to engage in rapid upskilling.
Results were presented to university leadership and industry leaders through multiple presentations, speaking engagements, and publications. I co-presented our findings at the Online Learning Consortium in 2019, and published a peer-reviewed paper with IGI Global in 2022. Click here to read an excerpt of the paper.
Results & Outcomes
I created and published design principles for all university microcredentials that included concepts such as: Meeting learners where they are, empowering them to choose their own path, leading with what learners need, creating autonomous experiences, and prioritizing delightful digital experiences that were mobile first and easily accessible.
We concluded that frontline employees are looking for solutions that give them control – control over when, where, and how they learn. They want learning that is flexible, short, simple, and user-friendly. They would like options that can serve as pathways into degrees should they want to pursue that later. Any solution must seamlessly fit into their lives without major disruptions.
Additionally, my research found that frontline employees would like to see a different version of higher education – a shortened experience that is valued by employers, credible, and held accountable to industry standards. They want to see credentials and education that has direct results on their economic mobility in the short-term.
Finally, user research revealed that ideally all learning content should be delivered to frontline employees in the formats they already seek to learn, and be available for access whenever learners might want to access it in their day. Audible content, short bursts of learning, and subscription access would allow learners low risk in engaging with content as it fits their lifestyle and learning needs.