100,000 Earners Later, WGU Is Still Playing the Long Game
Tyson Heath joined for AACRAO’s Credential Chats
Western Governors University is closing in on a remarkable milestone: 100,000 unique learners earning digital badges, with more than 200,000 badges already issued. Those are big numbers. And the implications about repeat-earning suggest even more important stories beyond successful issuing of innovative credentials.
But my favorite part of my AACRAO Credential Chat with Tyson Heath wasn’t the big number.
It was the restraint behind it.
WGU now has about 100 badges, and Tyson described a Credential Integrity Team that can pursue scale while also being willing to say “No” when the risk of a new badge proposal is credential clutter.
When somebody says, “We’d like to issue a badge for this,” the answer isn’t automatically, “Great — here’s the software.”
Do our solutions answer the known questions of the past or the uncertain needs of tomorrow?
They ask what the learner actually did. What was assessed? What skills does it represent? What metadata supports the assertion? And, critically: Is this credential relevant and valuable enough to become part of a WGU student’s official learning record?
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As Tyson put it, they don’t want to “add more confusion and ambiguity to an already confusing space.”
The conversation leaves me reflecting on something under the surface of WGU’s approach: strategy that seems self-aware of the WHY, rooted in assessing whether solutions provide answers to the known questions of the past or the uncertain needs of tomorrow.
For example, they are not treating badges as digital participation trophies or smaller versions of degrees. I don’t think there is anything right or wrong about those two approaches, and I probably advocate in favor of both in most circumstances. WGU’s strategy however, is using badges as part of a much longer game to make the skills inside learning visible, machine-readable, and useful to learners before, during, and after completion.
That during piece can also mean recognizing meaningful milestones along the way rather than asking someone to wait years before receiving learning records they can use.
I also appreciated Tyson being candid and vulnerable. He and his colleagues have been at this for years. Lessons have been learned and the implementation has evolved. And lucky for us who have a lot we can learn from them, they are generous about sharing their work.
Dive into the full (17 minute) conversation in AACRAO’s Innovative Credentials community, where you can also lend your own voice to the conversation. It is FREE to join after creating an account, and it’s also where you can be notified with each new Credential Chats episode when they go live!
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