The Lifelong Learner Project building an ecosystem and digital wallet, centering the needs of teachers
This is the second blog in a four-part series which covers blockchain technology applications in education, featuring the winners of the U.S Department of Education’s and American Council on Educations’ Blockchain Innovation Challenge. In this entry, we will discuss the use of blockchain to support teacher credentialing.
Imagine working through a teacher preparation program, graduating, and then setting out to get hired for your first teaching position. While it may read straightforward on paper, it is far from simple in practice. The teaching candidate must take a praxis examination, collect their transcripts, and submit these documents along with other attestations to the state licensure system. The candidate can start applying for teaching positions in a provisional manner, but then must request their approved teacher certification to the school district in the hiring process. Altogether, these processes can take 3–6 months, requiring dialogue between the prospective teacher, their teacher preparation program, ETS, state licensing body, and schools. Sourcing documents and verifying credentials from multiple locations regarding teacher education, preparation, assessment, and licensing can be time-consuming and burdensome, and given the dynamic and expanding landscape of credential providers, an individual could lose access to their learning records. The Lifelong Learner Project, Powered by Teachers is developing a blockchain-enabled solution that cuts the process time down to a week and provides teachers with a secure digital wallet in which to store their professional data.
The Lifelong Learner Project, Powered by Teachers
The Lifelong Learner Project, one of the winners of the Blockchain Innovation Challenge, seeks to give educators greater agency over their professional data. RANDA Solutions, an organization that supports state educational agencies with adopting technological solutions, led the project team and collaborated with the Utah State Board of Education and an ecosystem of partners from various sectors. From focus groups with teachers, the project team found that teachers’ personal qualifications are stored in multiple places, records of professional development experiences are easily lost, and additional responsibilities beyond teaching are hard to document and verify. The project team heard a demand among educator focus group participants for a portfolio for organizing, storing, and recertifying their professional credentials and for connecting with opportunities.
How can blockchain solve the problem?
The project team envisioned an ecosystem that gives teachers access to and control over their teaching credentials. Users and credential-issuing entities, such as a university, state licensing body, licensing exam organization, or instructors in teacher preparation program would be assigned a unique digital identity that allows them to publish to the blockchain. The interface for teachers would be a blockchain-enabled digital wallet that brings together their professional data, including credentials, licenses, assessments, endorsements, professional learning, lesson plans, work samples, and other exemplars of practice. Teachers could then share their data with state licensing systems, human resources offices, learning management systems, and other systems to start a teaching job, keep track of their responsibilities and accomplishments, and access further opportunities. A digital wallet would relieve teachers of the burden of individually contacting, sourcing, and validating their credentials whenever they pursue a new opportunity and serve as a professional portfolio.
What’s next?
Pilot users are currently testing the Teacher Wallet developed by The Lifelong Learner Project, and lessons learned from testing will inform further development of the technology. The project team is currently working to grow in the following areas:
- Increasing the number of credentials being published to the Teacher Wallet
- Supporting the creation of uniform standards of practice across states, aligned with an interstate compact for occupational licensure portability
- Supporting special populations that are particularly affected by their access and control over their professional data, including military spouses, rural educators, novice teachers, and paraprofessionals
- Adding a job board functionality to the Teacher Wallet
- Integrating into licensure systems, beginning with ecosystem partner, the State of Utah Board of Education
- Iterating and enhancing the user experience
- Reviewing the accessibility of the application and ensuring all colors, buttons, and functionality are designed to be accessible and inclusive.
What did the project team learn?
The project impressively brought together a diverse network of partners committed to creating a teacher-centered ecosystem while navigating an emerging technology. In the American Council on Education final report on the Education Blockchain Initiative, the project team shared some valuable lessons learned:
- Project co-lab. Regular meetings with the entire ecosystem with alternating agendas to cover technological updates, build ecosystem consensus, and create adoption strategies.
- Teacher focus groups. Discussion with education professionals in various stages of their career lifecycle allowed challenges to be clarified so that the solution could be built “with” rather than “for” the users it intends to serve.
- Frame the problem quickly. Having an image of a teacher’s paper portfolio allowed us to convey in only a few seconds the massive challenge that educators have about collecting, storing, and sharing their professional credentials. It is imperative that the real-world problem is quickly relatable to not only the people experiencing the headache but also stakeholders and the general population.
- Community outreach meeting. Providing the larger interested community with an opportunity to learn more about The Lifelong Learner Project allowed for ecosystem expansion. It had over 60 attendees and the recording has been viewed on YouTube 119 times.
- Dynamic ecosystem. Our flexible ecosystem has continued to expand during the phases of the Blockchain Innovation Challenge with additional members joining.
- The Lifelong Learner Project website. Having a simple website has allowed us to share The Lifelong Learner message with many more individuals and a webform has allowed us to capture the interest of the community and provide regular updates.
- Get the right people on the team. Make sure that the team has a balance between technologists and practitioners. This will allow you to make sure the solution being built actually solves the problem.
- Collaboration over competition. Because this technology is fledgling there is ample room for everyone to participate in how it is adopted in the future. By letting go of competition and working together projects can be both affordable and interoperable by design.
Supporting a diverse educator workforce and professional growth to strengthen student learning is a key priority of the US Department of Education — a priority that The Lifelong Learner Project shares. The project team ultimately aims to empower all learners by centering educators, reducing the administrative barriers that can delay or interrupt their careers and recognizing and facilitating their development and leadership.
