In theory, transcripts are a way to communicate a student or graduate’s academic achievement in higher education. The problem is, they only really communicate achievements to other people in academia. Outside academia, they’re fairly useless.
They say nothing about the skills a student may or may not have acquired at school. They say nothing about what extra-curricular activities a student has engaged in. At best, they communicate the lists of classes that a student took (though without curricula, it’s difficult to see what that means). And if the credential is from another country, it might not even convey that much, since employers will be unlikely to interpret it properly (hence the multi-million dollar credential evaluation industry).
People have come up with all sorts of ways to overcome these problems – diploma supplements, badges, and whatnot. But these sorts of initiatives suffer from a really basic collective action problem: employers only value what they understand, and new transcripts and credentials are, by definition, unfamiliar. They only become familiar if a lot of institutions adopt the same standards on diploma supplements/badges/whatever, and start pumping out transcripts based on them. And of course, that’s not easy to arrange. Institutions won’t put in the collective effort unless they know businesses will use the new system, and businesses can’t commit to using the new system until they see it and understand it.
That sounds like a recipe for paralysis, and so it has been for many years. But now there is new player on the scene who might be able to genuinely revolutionize the system. And that player is LinkedIn.
Think about it: a LinkedIn profile is about the closest thing the world has to a common CV. Employers all over the world know how to read it. So whatever LinkedIn puts into its template becomes the de facto global standard. So if LinkedIn starts to allow various forms of Open Badges onto the site (you can do it now, but it’s through a patch), vastly more employers will be exposed to this type of credential, badges will start to gain currency, and hence employer demand for badges will rise.
Now think a little bit ahead to when paper degrees die out entirely. Already, schools in North America can link directly with the Ministry of Education in China to verify academic records.
All of which is to say, change is coming to this little corner of student business processes. It’s time for institutions to start thinking how they’ll react.
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I can’t agree with you on LinkedIn. It is, by its very nature, subject to “self-assessment”…people put want they want. They embellish, they fudge, they outright lie. Most businesses completely ignore it unless someone they know is directly linked (1 degree of separation), and even then it merely gets over the first hump. The only people who really do use it are generally Type A entrepreneurs or sales people, and they tout it loud and large. HR people in big companies? Not so much.
Equally, I don’t see how you come to the conclusion one company will dominate in digital. With the exception of Amazon, there are lots of players in just about every digital realm out there, including health records which is ahead of the academic curve and job posting sites which is very similar. The one avenue companies have had in stealing digital record market niche is in being the go-to resource (i.e. cheapest) for digitizing them. But the privacy concerns of the records are huge, and turning it from a scanning business to a data business is no small feat. It hasn’t worked in health where it is actively needed to actually directly impact the person (i.e. a digital health record could save your life regardless where you’re getting medical treatment).
For academia, I don’t see the inroad for the company — academia doesn’t need to digitize their old records as the system works just fine for them — badly, but just fine. Going forward, everything is already digitized. Heck, even ordering of journals by university libraries isn’t reduced to one big player and they’ve been doing it online since the late 80s.
I think you’ll end up with a series of companies, just like you have for doing credit scores, background checks, posting jobs online. And coverage will be disjointed. Let`s estimate 4 big players (2 US, 1 EU, 1 Asian) and a dozen small players, and from there I think a bunch of North American universities will go with both U.S., some will go with one or the other, some will go with a small player only (someone local or run by an alumni). EU and Asians will go with regional choice plus one of the Americans.
I think a better question is whatever model comes forward, who pays for the service?
Universities are usually loathe to do so as it is cost-loser for them in the short-term. You know they`ll pass it back to the students eventually, somehow. Or directly through an alumni charge — here`s your degree, if you want it on CompanyA, it`s $25, Company B, $35, etc.
The bus could let individuals register (like LinkedIn) and then have the individual pay the company to go get the data.
Or the university and individual can list for free, and the company using the service could pay for searching. But as you said, companies won`t pay unless they know the service works. And it only works if you get the first two onboard cheaply.
I doubt it will happen anytime in the next 15 years, unless someone invents a much more robust programming language that allows cross-platform data exchange (i.e. system agnostic) and thus creates a standard that others can adopt more easily.
I’m somewhere between Paul and the original post on this one. Certainly LinkedIn is the dominant player in the de facto CV department: 10.8 million users in Canada alone (as of Oct. 2014), and it makes over 50% of its revenue not from advertising, but from providing talent pipelines of (mostly passive) candidates to recruiters.
But it’s dangerous to build your business around another company’s business model. Why doesn’t LinkedIn support the Open Badge standard already? Probably because they figure they can make more money with custom solutions for their talent pipeline clients.
Open Badges is an evolving open standard that enables multiple players to provide diverse solutions for diverse needs in a skills ecosystem. If LinkedIn won’t go there, then maybe others who do will have an edge on them. The Innovator’s Dilemma.
Very few PSEs are on this page and few of those have nailed the nub of it yet, though some are working on it: employability soft skills – communication, developing relationships, contextual problem solving, resilience, etc. – how to demonstrate these in authentic ways. I think it would be great if more employers were engaged in framing this. Not all PSEs are good at reaching out for that kind of help.