1Edtech’s Learning Impact 2022 Review
The first time I really knew I was in ‘education technology’ and not in the classroom part of education anymore was the IMS Global conference of 2017. I’d been part of OpenEd for two years by that point, but as I’d gotten involved in a new specification that aimed to be the ‘standard for standards’, it was time to step it up. Thus, I traveled to Denver, CO for four days of edtech interoperability work. Every year since then it’s been the conference I look forward to the most — the learning and ideas, usually a presentation, and meeting people from quite literally all over the education world.
Previous reviews (2019, 2018) of Learning Impact focused on work I was doing to lead and advance adoption of the fledgling CASE specification and in 2018–2019 in particular, the CASE Network. This conference was very different. Not only had I changed employers and type of institution to Empath which is focused on corporate learning/skills, but I haven’t been involved with CASE work directly in nearly two years.
This year I focused on attending sessions that will help Empath. There were sessions on CLR solutions with colleges and employers, Badging and tying those badges to competencies, and a couple sessions dealing in particular with Skills. I am excited to soon dive into the excellent work the Education Design Lab has done on their 21st century skills in an RSD format. At an IBM badging presentation I was the annoying guy that when the presenter mentioned their internal badges were based off of their proprietary talent framework, that they should just open source it! To be fair, they did buy a huge open source company Red Hat in 2019!
Presentation Time!
I also presented with the University of Phoenix on work we’ve done to do course-skill alignment in order to improve employee-skill inferencing. The attendees were unusually engaged and it was a joy to take a breath and present about the work we’re doing as well as meet my University of Phoenix colleague(s) in person. Jokes about JSON falling flat aside it was a ton of fun to be in front of real people presenting for probably the first time since 2020.
It was a pleasure to see people I hadn’t seen in years and get excited about the potential and actual practical of how CASE/interoperable learning skills can benefit students, instructors and employers. I hope to somehow get involved again in building the interoperability ecosystem again and help make it easier to get folks onboarded and involved as well. But for now, I’m looking forward to some rest after four days away from home and daily work. Then, back to work to make the technology happen to empower people with skills!
