What Might a Sovereign Learner Record Look Like?

In attending an event called YesWay, I had the opportunity to share some of my ideas around what the future of learning could look like, in particular around the documenting and charting of the pathways that learners may take. I call my concept the Sovereign Learner Record (SLR), an ecosystem that enables learners to create and craft a rich and diverse learning portfolio where multiple voices can share feedback and assess them in authentic ways.

There are already tools out there that play many of the roles needed to make the SLR a reality, and with the right audience such a tool could develop into a legitimate alternative to the static and antiquated transcripts that currently are the standard for most school systems.

This article serves as a bit of a roadmap for my thinking around a Sovereign Learner Record, sharing ways that I could imagine this concept turning into a reality.

First some of my design criteria:

One element I have never been at ease with in education is in who ‘owns’ a learners record. With few exceptions it is the institution that they learner studies under. I went to Park Avenue for Elementary School for a year, and my record of learning for that year is stored within that school. They transferred my record to the next school I went to, despite it only representing a single year of my childhood.

What if I had a teacher who did not like me, did not understand my needs or history? I had no control then over my record of learning, a fact that still remains true to this day with (nearly) all my learning records.

The role of any institution, education provider, or assessor (including oneself) can be as simple as delivering a record for the learner to decide how and when they present this information, and to whom.

For an SLR to exist, the tools and methods used should be as open access as possible. Such a system thrives when it can be federated, where data can flow across platforms seamlessly and the user is not held hostage by a single ecosystem or application. Furthermore, an open source backbone allows for other to adapt and grow the concept to meet their needs.

For something as personal as the learning journey we take, there is no one size fits all. Our current system of doing learning records is incredibly myopic, only shedding a thin perspective on one aspect of the learner. How interesting would it be if we could examine our learning through different lenses? One day a learner could look at themselves through a critical skills perspective, and then immediately examine their cumulative learning experiences through the lens of SDGs by changing the template. Furthermore, learners could create their own lenses that reflect themselves. We could highlight learning experiences as stories that dive more deeply into what makes us unique.

This may sound a bit corny, but if we expect such a tool to be regularly used by learners it must be beautiful. UI design in schools is dead on utilitarian (albeit often non-functional), and beauty is glaringly absent in most learning records. It leaves me with little wonder why learners rarely dive into the details of their own records… it is largely text, rarely interactive, and simply does not tell the story of the learning that has happened.

We want something that anybody can pick up and just use. While there are many elements that could improve such a system, starting simple is a key.

So with a starter set of criteria in mind (I would love to hear more if you have them!) what tools and resources can we look towards to help develop such an ecosystem? The good news is that there are already a number of pieces in play…

This endeavor in my opinion has so many good qualities, and is already mature enough to be used across a range of fields. The standard creates portable records that have a lot of relevant information contained within a graphic image file. They can be aligned to standards if desired, tagged, narratives can be formed on them, and there are ways to stack them in the event that the learning in a linear fashion is needed.

There are dozens of services that allow you to create and issue OpenBadges, both paid and free. Here are a couple worth checking out:

I have been playing in Education Technology for a while, and ever since I started I have always found Moodle, an Open Source Learning Management System (LMS), to align deeply with the values I have. The LMS itself speaks to a content delivery system and an old way of thinking, but the platform does an excellent job at organizing student data. It also can issue OpenBadges automatically or manually.

Moodle could be modified to provide both a directory of learning experiences and a means to house sovereign learning records.

Anyhow, I hope that provides a bit of food for thought, and perhaps even some pathways in which the concept of a Sovereign Learner Record could become a usable and real tool for the many independent learners seeking something new and different.

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