Conference Agenda

An innovation developed by the T3 Innovation Network to enable the linking or binding of data in multiple digital credentials (LERs) as well as enable an individual or organization (e.g., an employer) to validate one or more assertions in someone’s LER. Learn more about this project as well as a glimpse into the next phase of the work where a free to use publishing tool will be made available. This will be a fun and engaging session that will demonstrate the potential of empowering individuals to generate self-asserted digital credentials for themselves that can also be validated by their peers.

The United States has become increasingly divided into warring, hyperpartisan camps. Each camp exists in its own bubble of information unified by their joint disdain for the other camp. This toxic polarization threatens the institutions and processes that support our democracy.

Studies show that although there is broad support and agreement on the fundamental principles of democracy, there is also widespread belief that the “other side” does not support these principles. This creates what researchers call the “subversion dilemma:” If Americans think the other side is anti-democratic, then they believe their own leaders are justified in committing similar acts to “save democracy.” Perception then becomes reality.

The good news is that studies also show that polarization can be successfully mitigated by establishing important common ground and a shared identity. Our shared support of the principles and processes of democracy can be a powerful foundation for that identity. Hundreds of nonprofits like Braver Angels and Living Room Conversations run programs demonstrating that we can bridge our seemingly irreconcilable differences. Yet these important activities are often drowned out by the cacophony of apocalyptic comments from politicians and the media that feed the subversion dilemma.

The Civics Credentialing System (CCS) has been developed to strengthen constitutional democracy in the United States by establishing a social amplification framework that encourages, recognizes and celebrates democracy-friendly behaviors on the part of citizens, candidates, officeholders, and organizations with a full spectrum of recogntion that ranges from formal through non-formal to informal.

The system will:

1. Socialize and normalize the skills that support American democracy.
2. Connect individuals and groups to organizations and activities that strengthen American democratic institutions
3. Increase the impact of democracy-friendly efforts and the resilience of democracy in the United States.

The Civics Credentialing System has been inspired by effective practices developed in the badging community since Mozilla's invention of the standard in 2011, many of which have featured at ePIC over the years. Having learned from organizations such as eCampusOntario, HPass and the Inter-American Development Bank, CCS is road-testing with its many partner organizations a set of principles, policies, models, tools and procedures that will enable them to meaningfully recognize pro-democratic behaviors at scale.

This presentation will provide a snapshot of the current state of CCS, including early wins and lessons learned along the way.

Many solutions have been proposed over the years to help employers, educational institutions, statistical agencies and other stakeholders speak about skills in the same “language” over the years. These solutions have tended to encourage the adoption of a common skills taxonomy – “one taxonomy to rule them all”; such solutions naturally face headwinds as organizations confront the inertia associated with sunk costs and cultural attachment to current practices. Therefore, we believe that the best way to facilitate the recognition of skills is through a translation process, and recent advances in AI large language models allow us to conduct such translation at scale using a wide range of textual inputs such as course syllabi and job descriptions.

We will present our progress towards such a universal skills translation program, which we refer to as LAISER (Leveraging AI for Skills Extraction and Research). LAISER is a project of George Washington University’s Program on Skills, Credentials, and Workforce Policy, currently being developed and tested in collaboration with higher education and workforce partners including Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), Northern Arizona University (NAU), Texas Workforce Commission, and Technologico de Monterrey’s Institute for the Future of Education.

Our process uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to link skills across multiple taxonomies, creating in effect a custom and flexible “taxonomy of taxonomies.” From this foundation we layer skills extraction processes and linking algorithms customized to structure human readable data into interoperable datasets. Applying our ML processes allows us to link one set of skills data to another with all the benefits that having a static crosswalk implies, but with the flexibility to link different types of skills data as they evolve. This creates a dynamic system of skill translation using the similarities between taxonomies to link the conceptual clustering of a skill between definitions. We are working towards the creation an open-source API that can be integrated into student information systems and HR information systems to enable credentials to be interpreted on the basis of the skills they represent, regardless of how an employer has chosen to describe desired competencies or an institution has decided to describe its coursework or degrees.

We will discuss initial applications of this work, focusing on two use cases of particular interest to a higher education audience: postsecondary accreditation and upward transfer. GWU is working with an emerging higher education accreditation organization in the United States, the National Accreditation Commission, which plans to integrate LAISER into its accreditation workflow for non-credit instruction an workforce-oriented credentials. Our vision is for our process to eventually facilitate determinations of eligibility for federal student financial assistance (“Pell grants”) for students enrolled in workforce programs that are currently ineligible for accreditation, opening new opportunities for skill development and career advancement for American workers. We will also describe our work with NOVA and NAU to “map” coursework from community colleges to the curricula of four-year institutions and job postings obtained from the National Labor Exchange Research Hub, improving the relevance of the undergraduate curriculum to labor market needs and ensuring that individuals can receive maximum credit towards their degrees for learning experiences at other institutions. We envision that LAISER could equally be useful in EU member states, aiding skills anticipation and matching initiatives underway in a wide range of countries (e.g., via CEDEFOP’s “Anticipating and Matching Skills” project, https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/projects/assisting-eu-countries-skills-matching).