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How Fine-Grained Will New Credentialism Get: Credit For Watching a TED Talk?
jyosim writes: In a sign of how willing some companies are to consider alternatives to higher education, services are popping up that allow employees to track their informal-learning activities so they can be added to their credentials. These activities can include such things as watching a TED talk, a Khan Academy video, or reading a newspaper article. "It’s easy to poke fun at a single TED talk or a single article and say, What is the merit of this and what’s the efficacy of a single article?" says David Blake, chief executive and a founder of Degreed, a service that logs what employees are learning online. "But when you zoom out and look at a year’s worth of learning," it adds up, he argues. "The average professional’s time on videos, books, and articles will substantially outweigh their time inside a classroom. In aggregate, it is the story of our lifelong learning."
Employers don't pay for training. The premise of this is fail.
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TED Talks nowadays seem to be more sub-industry leaders, not world-class industry leaders.
While it's good that the TED Talks have grown, that very growth has pushed aside what originally made them great.
Of course not.
He thinks he can have a business model to leverage the synergies of holistically tracking of the buzz-wordification of the educationalizing of people as it pertains to encouraging companies to place value on his system, thereby affording him a platform to optimize his return on his own personal branding in a lucrative fashion.
This is just more examples of companies trying to tell us what the way of the future is for education, while trying to capitalize on it, and without any supporting evidence.
Follow degreed.
I mean, can you imagine a bunch of little micro-acomplishments like self-assigned gold stars on someone's resume? "In October Larry watched 8 videos on how to do something, representing a year-over-year increase of 100% for that period." I just don't see this happening.
Now, the data acquired by a bunch of people reporting what they've watched, and the accompany ability to monetize and exploit that ... well, I'm sure that's all part of phase 2.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Every system of this nature is going to be fundamentally divisive, arbitrary, incomplete, and inaccurate. It's not possible to design a "fine-grained credentialism" system without requiring the full dedication of one person's attention to the activities of another, for every waking hour of the observed person.
Divisive: Where today coworkers have no qualms about sending interesting/educational links to their coworkers, like interesting reads in a technology journal or a tutorial on a new feature of some software (for example), if these things will be counted as "credentials" that improve hireability, job security, and/or compensation, then individuals will be motivated NOT to share anything they learn or read with coworkers, since their coworkers could use this to advance their own credentials, and get a leg up on the person who shared it with them. The people who succeed would thus be recipients of well-intentioned coworkers' educational resources and information, without sharing anything back to their coworkers.
Arbitrary: What counts "for (micro)credit", and what doesn't? Where do you draw the line? If you draw the line at some arbitrary place, there are going to be educational resources that people use, which are extremely relevant to someone's job that actually enhanced their suitability to do their work, but don't count for credit. If you don't draw a line at all, or set the bar so low that just about anything can be accepted, then a lot of people could arguably gain "credit" just by watching CNN and claiming credit for the random sound bytes that sound off information that pertains in some general way to the field the worker is in. Microsoft stock went up? Well, I'll claim a credit for Technology! Because Microsoft is Technology! Oy vey...
Incomplete: There are many experiences that can be very educational for someone, but don't have any authenticity, quantifiability or verifiability to them. For example, if you are on a 3-hour bus ride and strike up a random conversation with a passenger who happens to be in the same field as you, and you learn something entirely new from them that opens your eyes and enables you to do your job better, can you claim credit for that? How would the organization know whether you're lying or not? How many of these little nuggets can you squeeze into their system in a day without being flagged for possible forgery? If there's a limit and you can find it, you better believe the min-maxers will find a way to fill up their daily quota, every day, without fail, on their way up the corporate ladder -- walking on the heads of honest people who probably are more competent than they are.
Inaccurate: This is really the biggest problem with the whole idea of "credentialism" from life experience or gaining "micro-credits" for every little thing you do or learn: you cannot implement a system, short of Orwellian 24/7 total surveillance and constant manual, human monitoring, that *fairly* and *accurately* captures exactly what each person has learned every day, and what kind of merit that learning deserves. Those are actually two separate problems: actually capturing all of the distinct learning events, and coming up with some kind of a system to determine how useful, educational, or meritorious those events were with respect to the individual's suitability to fill a certain role in a job.
If the system is too rigid, you miss out on things like open source projects, reading/responding to mailing lists, the aforementioned "bus conversation", etc. If it's too open, people will gamify their careers through lying or taking the easiest course toward getting an advantage over people who are vying for similar jobs, all so they can make more money.
Now granted, the de facto education system is basically an extreme example of a system like this that is simply too rigid and too coarse-grained to be fair, but making it fine-grained doesn't actually solve any problem: you're just shifting the problems to another set of equally severe problems, without making the hiring an