 My name is Phillip Long, I am the Chief Innovation Officer and Associate Vice Provost at the University of Texas at Austin. Okay. Well, you're at the conference this week talking a little bit about learning recognition systems. What is a learning recognition system? Fundamentally, a learning recognition system is a piece of software and a framework for identifying when students have achieved something that faculty or others in the institution have set out for them to learn. Doing so in a way that tries to make it as objective as possible and recording that so that it can be used as a way of justifying the value of whatever achievement it is that they've been awarded. It doesn't mean that they're technology-based, they've been around for hundreds of thousands of years in some ways. Well, early on, if you remember, people used to get, and still do, in the military they get badges associated with achievements of various kinds. Some for performance in academic settings, some for performance on the field of battle. So those are recognition systems. It can be done simply in awarding a certificate for accomplishing the various requirements of a course of study. What's happened in recent years with the invention of various kinds of digital technologies is those have been effectively digitized and the processes have been written up as execution steps in a learning sequence that can be tracked in a digital environment. And by doing so, it also affords greater both transparency and visibility to the learning, but it also allows it to be connected to other kinds of digital artifacts. Is there any sort of standardization going on where you can take things across institutions, across different learning systems? Absolutely. For a while there, there was something called the Open Badge Initiative, which was a community-based organization that was trying to standardize the actual structure of the data associated with the elements that are necessary to recognize achievement, who the issuer was, what it was for, what is the evidence that was submitted to be able to judge and be awarded this particular achievement, etc. That group has been merged now with an international software standards organization. That group is called IMS Global and they do interoperability standards for all kinds of software, primarily in the learning environment. So they define interoperability for how learning tools plug into a learning management system through a standard called LTI or how information is captured, the events associated with the activity students are doing in a class, how those sensors are described and how that data is passed on to something else so that everybody can follow the same pattern and therefore that data can move across boundaries. How do you think learning recognition systems will evolve and affect higher education in the future? And that's probably the $64,000 question. In some cases, it depends on the sector of higher education you're talking about. They have been traditionally associated with more skill-based activities. And so those programs and those parts of higher education that have a more vocational scope tend to be adopting these things relatively quickly. More traditional research focused universities have been less willing to step into this space because I think they would say, well, how do you objectively determine that someone has thought creatively? And that's what we do in university. We teach creative thinking or we teach you how to think better. And the challenge is, in fact, just doing that because in some sense, that judgment is being made by the faculty member in the classroom based on something. And in many ways, this effort is trying to say, well, what can we do to actually extract out the key elements of that in a way that if you brought 50 similar professors together of that discipline and you asked them, did these things indicate that they achieved X? There would be reasonable concurrence that they'd say yes. Do you think, and this may be overly dramatic talk, I'm curious, do you think the popularization of badges and certifications could not delegitimize degrees but could compete with the degree system? So there's certainly the potential threat of the Tower of Badges, similar to the Babel Tower that we are familiar with, and it is a legitimate concern, particularly if the attention to the criteria associated with the rubric for assessing whether or not something has been achieved is taken carefully and seriously and how it's being developed and applied. I think that the likelihood of that is diminishing, even as the potential growth of badging increases, because there has been additional data added to the open badge specification that describes who the issuer is, what the authority the issuer has for making that assertion, if there is a third party that has validated that the issuer is capable of making that assertion. So there's sort of tracing back, if you will, the authenticity and the authority associated with that process, which gives a little bit more credibility to the assertion in the first place. What is more interesting is the potential for the idea that the issuer is no longer just the institution, and that's the idea that the students themselves may be able to issue badges to others based on the extent to which that student judged the contribution of another student to their own work. So you might expect, for example, if you have a certain number of badge points that you can allocate to your colleagues when you're working on a project and you've really helped me a lot, I could give you X number of badge points, write a description as to why those badge points were earned. That's the criteria. What's the rubric with which I judged that because I was able based on your help to do the following and then issue you something. That starts to democratize the process and prop potentially makes institutions nervous. Right, yeah. There's a million questions that go along with that that we don't have time to get to, but I'll let that one go because I mean, I find myself feeling ambivalent about it. I mean, on the one hand, it's great to, it's like music, it's like the music industry, it's great that anybody can make music now, but it kind of sucks that anybody can make music now. Well, yes and no. I mean, there are people that have emerged out of that, that vast horde who turn out to be phenomenally creative, worthy of everything that they've achieved. And yeah, that there's a lot more noise in the system, so it improves or increases the need for discernment. But you can also think of using this in ways to surface work that otherwise has been invisible. The most common example is most faculty are judged by the merits of their publications. Their publications are submitted to peer review processes. The people who do the peer review are, of course, their fellow faculty, but those people aren't rewarded for that work. It's just built into the system. The publisher takes their feedback, uses it to judge whether or not to accept the publication or not. The individual who makes, does that work for that purpose, what do they get? Other than legitimate contribution to their own discipline, so there's a sense of community obligation. But what if the publisher awarded that individual review points and some sort of quality recognition for the reviews, and that starts to distinguish better reviewers from other reviewers. And if that reviewer could then take that information and present it in their package for promotion and tenure and say, I've been doing all of these reviews, it's taking this amount of time and here's the value that I've contributed, based on the publisher's comments, shouldn't that count for something? Absolutely. Right now, you can't do that. What technology trends do you think will enable student agency in the future? Well, the biggest one is the thing that's quite the hype these days in the cryptocurrency world, and that's the so-called badged blockchain. And the reason is that the blockchain can disintermediate or separate the mechanism by which the award of credit and its management can be done independent of the institution. So in the cryptocurrency world, the whole sort of disruption that came along with that is that you no longer need banks to intermediate the exchange of money. People can buy and sell across each other and do it by transferring Bitcoin from one person to another and there's nothing in the middle. Well, in the blockchain environment for universities and credit, you can imagine blocks, credits being awarded and instantiated in a block. That block is part of a fabric that's outside of the institution. They may be a part of it if they wish, they don't have to be. And since it's been encrypted, it can't be changed. So it has the same authority that it always has. At the time, the value of it and the authority of it is determined when it's written and it stays with it permanently. So you no longer have to go back to an institution and say to Joe Smith, actually, we'll earn this. Well, if they've got a piece of information that's written into a blockchain that says they did, then they did. And so there's the question of what sort of impact that will have on the institutions down the road is that one that frees them from that responsibility and keeps them from having to spend that money and money and energy doing all that verification or does it threaten them? Is there anything else you wanna add that we haven't touched on? You mentioned earlier about the proliferation of types of certification and such. I think the backstory behind that is the thing that we haven't talked about and that's the actual pressures from the job market and employers who are struggling to find ways of identifying workers who can perform the jobs they have and are a bit taken aback at this point by the lack of information, a transcript affords them. And now they've built all kinds of procedures to try to look past that and talk to the person's references and other sorts of things. But you can imagine where some of that evidence of their achievement is instantiated in some sort of a record, including actual artifacts that they produced to be awarded that work, which gives the employer a chance to actually see, oh, here's a CAD drawing that they made while they were doing this project. Or here is a way in which they tested this particular chemical. That's a lot different than getting a B in chemistry. That's true. Thanks so much for your time, Phil. Appreciate it.