Lifetime Learning the Focus at Trusted Learner Network Unconference
On March 2nd, higher education leaders, educators, technologists and students from across the country made major strides in the development of a new way to demonstrate the breadth of student learning at the inaugural Trusted Learner Network (TLN) Unconference, hosted by ASU. The event represents the start of a global community of experts and activists leveraging the TLN to improve the higher education experience worldwide.
The TLN is a secure and decentralized approach for recording, curating and sharing learner data on abilities and skills across the learner’s lifespan. This represents a large-scale effort, between numerous institutions and organizations, to manage the diverse array of learning interactions that take place today. Trust is central to the TLN, made possible by cryptography, blockchain and its supporting technologies. This technology and trust allows learners to move beyond the “20th century way of doing things,” as ASU CIO Lev Gonick puts it, in favor of expanded agency for learners to share their achievements themselves for the rest of their lives.
From the start, the Unconference format, which allows attendees to identify priorities for their work, facilitated openconversations informing the focuses of the afternoon’s working groups. Essentially, facilitatorsof different aspects of the TLN’s work streams gave “lightning pitches,” short presentations describing the nature of their topic and what work could be achieved in relation to them. The lightning pitches invited participants interested in working on a particular area of focus to do so for the bulk of the day. All of this work attempted to answer the question of what a distributed ledger of learner credentials, superseding traditional forms of requests and lengthy verification and credit transfer processes, would actually look like in practice.
At first, groups gathered to identify overarching, guiding principles. Selective disclosure, in which a learner can decide what information to transfer and to who, was key. One team discussed giving students the ability to share what they learned directly to others with trust based on verification as essential to their development.But a question arose: if students are allowed to tell their own story, is there a danger of confidential information becoming too public?
Another group envisioned applications that can leverage the TLN to address new use cases concluded that the Network has to safeguard personal data with layers of security. Standardization was the domain of another team thinking of use cases at an organizational level. The TLN can serve to unify language (such as the abundance of acronyms employed by different institutions) and source institutional and employer data to allow learners to tell a cohesive story about the relevance of their skills. Such a capability can only be full-fledged ifa set of TLN and networks were adopted at a large scale, another group explained.
After these underlying goals were identified, work began on illuminating some specifics. The Higher Education Impact team, which spun up from a “Choose Your Own Adventure” group that reflected the Unconference’s flexible nature, illustrated things only the TLN can do, and institutional changes the TLN can facilitate. The improvement of institutions resulting from feedback about which learners got jobs is one capability. It’s best to think of the traditional way credentialssignalvalue; they usually move “downstream” from the higher education institution to the employer, telling the latter what the learner achieved.
But the TLN could facilitate, in a unified way, the transfer of that information back “upstream” from the employer to the institution, conveying back to the institution what aspects of what students learned were valued by the employer. This would also illuminate the gaps in knowledge or skills that remained or were simply missing. And processes that already exist, such as credit loss reduction, could be improved to better facilitate student mobility between institutions.
One group, dedicated to Learner Empowerment, also found some exciting possibilities outside the technical. They envisioned a pairing of the TLN’s technological capabilities with human support services that can help students define their pathway through lifetime learning. In their explanation, the TLN would be a utility for public good, enabling greater socioeconomic mobility and the shift of the status quo. The challenges of widespread adoption, privacy and governance -- in accordance with both on-the-books laws and ethical use of technology -- are still on the horizon for the future of learning. Takeaways forkey themes include:
Digital Identity - Recommended users’ data and access be mediated through an open source TLN, interoperable with other networks deployed at “internet scale.”
Privacy - Goals should be set by technical and moral/ethical considerations. A "TLN Privacy Canvas" was proposed based on decision-making guided by account ownership, data usage, time, opportunity and the legal system. This will allow for a unified reasoning of the term “privacy,” which means something different to many people.
Governance - “Governance is hard but necessary." The TLN 's architecture provides an initial context. Cryptography ensures the veracity of data. Governance addresses the management and guarantee of provenance, that is, the trustworthiness of the chain of assertions back to the point of origin.
Value Proposition to Employers - Employers’ needs have to be better met if the TLN is to be successful. The value of the TLN must be in tangible measures, such as the reduction in time and risk in hiring, and supporting employee professional development. The TLN is designed to support richer learner records that ever-increasing data intensive HR workflows capitalize on, bringing qualified learners to the attention of employers looking for a set of skills, achievements or experiences.
Ultimately, though, the challenges didn’t inhibit the bright ideas of the highly motivated representatives of higher education institutions, non-profit organizations, corporations and student bodies at the Trusted Learner Network Unconference. “The success of the inaugural TLN community event in bringing together such diverse stakeholders who are all invested in this idea is exciting,” said Michelle Watt, Product Manager for the TLN at UTO. “Our challenge will be to keep the community engaged and collaborating as we work to overcome the challenges ahead and make the idea of a life-long verifiable learning record a reality for all learners.”
And the trust inherent to the project is not just based on technology. It’s also a testament to the reciprocal relationships between students, institutions and employers that can make lifetime learning goals possible.