The Need for Explorative Education Tracking

Governments, employers, and other interested third parties still look to traditional institutions of education to verify that learning has taken place. Schools and colleges thus play the same centralized, closed system role that banks do in the financial system. Like banks that ensure the validity and authenticity of financial transactions, educational institutions award degrees of completion that “validate” (albeit poorly) that a particular learner has learned a certain skill, competency or body of knowledge.

Schools thus provide the trust that is needed when an employer hires a new employee or a government seeks to hold institutions accountable for educating its citizens. The question for entrepreneurs looking to truly disrupt education is not how to democratize access to learning content. That nut has already been cracked.

The real question is, like bitcoin, how do we develop an open system for measuring, verifying and credentialing learning, particularly when learning is occurring in increasingly nontraditional ways? To put it differently, how do we break the monopoly that traditional, centralized institutions have over the critical issue of validation and trust?

An effective solution to this problem would supply the needed social proof, sorely missing today, that would validate and give meaning to free and ubiquitous learning content. It would allow self-directed learners to curate their own educational pathways (or have them curated by third parties). And it would provide a universal language for learners to communicate and showcase their skills and for employers and others to be able to understand in a much more transparent and nuanced fashion whether the people they hire possess the skills needed to succeed.