Matthew Pittinsky
Matthew Pittinsky, a pioneer in education technology, is more than an entrepreneur; he is a sociologist of education. In 1997 he co-founded Blackboard Inc., serving first as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and then Executive Chairman. Today, Blackboard is considered by most industry analysts to be a leading provider of online education systems around the world.
In 2011, Pittinsky joined Parchment as CEO and has helped guide the organization to the forefront of eTranscript solutions. He has led Parchment through five rounds of funding and plays a leadership role in the expansion and digital exchange of education credentials including more than just a learner’s transcript.
Currently on the faculty of Arizona State University, Pittinsky also serves on the Board of Trustees of The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and is leading a national effort to establish a national, standardized Postsecondary Achievement Report (PAR), a digital “extended transcript†that would more fully record student achievement and knowledge during their higher education experience.
He holds a B.S. in Political Science from American University, Ed.M. in Education Policy from Harvard University Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Sociology of Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. In 2012 the Teachers College at Columbia University awarded him with The President’s Medal of Excellence to recognize his impact and innovation in the field of education technology and entrepreneurship.
e HEAR asked: How can we develop a standard that doesn't stifle the innovation of individual institutions to communicate the information that they want, in the way that they want it, but will still allow a reader to know what to expect in each section? Perhaps section one describes the institution: the types of degrees it issues, where it is located, how it is accredited. Maybe section two gives more information about courses and grades in a conventional format. Section three could be the place to put other types of experiential learning. And section four may be a summary of courses and grades and experiential learning from a competency perspective. How do we think about that kind of a structure for a document and the types of information that are associated with it?
The HEAR is still early in its adoption in the United Kingdom, and I wouldn't describe it as an unbridled success. Some institutions aren't sure how much information they want to communicate in their credentials. But the nice thing about the HEAR is that it's backward compatible. If all an institution wants to do is issue a conventional academic transcript as a HEAR, then it sends only sections one and two, for example. But if it wants to begin to communicate competency, experiential, and other types of information, it can extend the transcript using an extensible machine-readable data format. There's also a template that gives readers of the credential an expectation of where that information can go over time.
In the United States, early work also is happening along these lines. One example is a call for a Postsecondary Achievement Report (PAR). Included in a PAR, we might have, for example, a cover page that talks about the college/university, the student for whom the credential has been prepared, how awards are issued (graduating magna cum laude, for example), and some information about accreditation. This might be followed by the actual transcript, since there are still expectations surrounding credit hours and how we break education up into discrete chunks.
The report would allow an institution to present this information in a conventional format but would also offer the opportunity to go deeper. For example, Stanford University offers an interactive digital transcript. Receiving the transcript in electronic format, the reader can click on any course listed and go right into the catalog description of the course. Clicking further leads to the syllabus. From the student perspective, clicking even further leads to an e portfolio and, depending on the program and what the student has done, shows actual evidence of the learning inside that classroom.
At this point the report might bring in competency information, as Northern Arizona University is doing. For example, what are the major competency expectations for a degree in the liberal arts? Did the student work well in a team structure, communicate with diverse populations, and analyze complicated materials? Did the student achieve full or only partial mastery of those competencies?
This offers the opportunity to present experiential information. Elon University has developed an experiential transcript that follows the traditional look-and-feel of a conventional transcript but presents additional information that includes whether a student was a leader in a group and how many hours he/she put into it, for example.
Finally, the PAR could present not just ledger information but also infographics to represent achievement over time. Why not display a trend line GPA or pie charts showing the student's exposure to different courses in different content areas?
Now the question becomes: are our information systems set up to be able to capture that information in a scalable way, and what level of attestation or verification or certification are institutions providing in terms of those rules and activities? The notion of the PAR is very much about setting the horizons for presenting a broader superset of data and information. How can we create an overall document framework, as well as an extensible machine-readable data format, that will allow us to communicate that information differently across institutions but in a way that can scale over time?
Then, how do we enable learners and graduates to use that framework to integrate their certificates and diplomas into their online identities? Students should be able to claim an electronic credential, with the associated security that makes it official, and put it into their LinkedIn or Facebook profile or into an online professional community profile (e.g., Care.com). They need the ability to collect multiple credentials from their home institution and also other institutions—licenses, badges, MOOC certificates, and experiential, academic, or competency transcripts—so they can share and deliver those credentials securely online.
Not surprisingly, the alumni office has become one of the biggest promoters of sharing credentials. Offering students the ability to take their higher education credentials and combine them with other credentials over their lifetime is a way to both promote the institution and enable students to make the most of the education that they've earned there. Sharing their diploma or certificate online is amazing social validation for the college/university and raises awareness among social networks, driving more interest back to the home institution.
Lastly, the learning process for students should be a key consideration of electronic credentialing. How can we take the machine-readable data embedded in these credentials and open up new types of analytics to help learners understand different types of pathways? How can expanded forms of electronic credentialing help students to determine which courses, which experiences, and which activities might have the biggest impact on their learning and their education as a whole?
Credentials matter in a knowledge economy as a key indicator of critical life outcomes, and the first step is modernizing the credential infrastructure for a digital world. Colleges and universities need to capture the entire educational experience to create a common understanding of both course and campus-based achievements. And higher education needs to do so electronically via a consistent document structure and data standard that institutions can use as a way to extend their traditional academic transcript or as a next-generation successor. Finally, higher education needs to do all this in a way that protects, preserves, and limits access to that data but that makes the data portable, available, and actionable for learners, graduates, other institutions, and employers.
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