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."

Comments

TED? Subtract credits!

[PvtVoid]

I'm becoming convinced TED talks actually make people stupider. Here's a TED talk about it.

Re:Self learning classroom learning

[gstoddart]

But does this man have such hubris that he thinks he can actually quantify it in any meaningful way?

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.