How AI Is Changing the Microcredentialing Conversation in K-12

Efforts to bring microcredentialing to K-12 students aren’t new — but they are evolving, fueled in part by advances in AI.

In recent years, many organizations across the education sector have focused on changing the way students’ skills and capabilities are recorded, by working to launch new initiatives and companies aimed at bringing the way students navigate academic and career transitions into a new technological era.

As artificial intelligence technologies rapidly reshape the way students learn and the careers they’ll eventually build, the technology is also being brough into credentialing, with the goal of capturing the full range of student skills in a more sophisticated and precise way.

The interest in transforming microcredentials through new forms of technology comes amid broader changes in how schools are thinking about workforce skills and preparation.

Screatedtate and local policymakers and education leaders have shown increased interest in bolstering career and technical education and college and career readiness, and in some cases, they have provided new funding for those efforts..

e Interest in promoting new ways of demonstrating academic and workforce skill has driven a number of high-profile partnerships and deals over the past few years. One such arrangement was the recent pairing of two prominent education organizations, ETS and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, on their Skills for the Future initiative.

The interest in new approaches to measuring and reporting student skills was asl evident in learning management system giant Instructure’s $835 million acquisition of credentialing platform Parchment. ETS’ acquisition of Mastery Transcript Consortium, a nonprofit organization and network of schools that promote competency-based education, also stands out.

Deep in this work is Geeta Verma, the founder and CEO of LivedX, a startup focused on using artificial intelligence technologies to help students capture and document their lived experiences through microcredentialing.

The platform’s aim is to help students demonstrate their “durable skills,” Verma said. Those skills, also described as soft skills in some context, durable skills, like problem-solving and critical thinking, will be even more essential as artificial intelligence technologies become more prolific in our daily lives, Verma said.

“With AI in play, I think we all have to rethink what education and educational outcomes look like,” Verma said. “We have to embrace the whole student. It’s not just what badges they have, what certificates they have, transcripts, courses. Those are proxies for something, but we know that [students] are more than that.”

EdWeek Market Brief spoke to Verma about the changes she’s seeing in the credentialing and microcredentialing space, how the space is being affected by recent uncertainty about federal education spending, recent , and what influence she sees artificial intelligence technologies having on the field.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How would you describe the conversations taking place about credentialing and ensuring they reflect students’ skills?

We have to think about how to capture those skills that students bring to the table and [how they] intersect with everything that’s happening in their formal education. It needs to be complimentary.

Whether you want to call them durable skills, transferrable skills — whatever you want to call them — those should be a very important part of our credentials.

[As for] how they get integrated in our transcript or a resume or competency, we need to expand those boundaries of academic achievement beyond formal credentials. There’s literature supporting that. We have literature on forms of knowledge, we have literature on social cultural capital. How do you capture the essence of a student?

Is the effort to capture those durable, transferable skills gaining more momentum now?

Because of the work we are doing, we now have partnerships with both high schools and universities. And we’re establishing partnerships within [industries], because there is an idea about, how can we bring more students into the education space and create more success opportunities?

How do we create pathways for students who finish their education, or who don’t even finish? How do we create opportunities for them to intersect with employers so that they can be hired based on what they know, not based on what they don’t have, which is a degree or other formal credentials.

Those [formal degrees] are important. I am a university professor, but having worked on my own research with different groups of students, I do believe strongly that we need to expand the mission of academic achievement beyond just formal measures of assessment and achievement.

As you are working on growing a startup organization, what are you feelings on the outlook of the market and opportunities for growth?

The market will adjust and shift. Everybody, especially in K-12, from what my conversations have been, is in a wait-and-watch mode right now. It depends on how much federal funding folks get. So if those changes that are happening at the federal policy level start to impact the budget, it would be a very challenging thing, but I also think about these as opportunities.

What has your federal funding looked like?

We’ve already been funded by a National Science Foundation [Small Business Innovation Research] phase one grant because we are AI-powered, and we’re doing cutting-edge research in AI. And we will go for phase two grants.

Based on the work we’ve been doing in terms of both research and development, adding new knowledge to the field is very important for us. We want to be a product that is at the table, having this conversation, integrating those conversations and leading the conversation in thinking about whether it’s enrollment pathway challenges for universities, or [student] retention challenges — how can we conceptualize those ideas a little bit differently?

How do you see changes in federal funding impacting the momentum for establishing new skills and forms of credentials?

[Changes at the federal level are] an opportunity to rethink how we do many of the activities we’ve undertaken in the past. There is absolutely going to be a lot of pain around federal funds being cut for different programs, because people are losing jobs that were funded by grants.

My optimism is not for people losing their livelihoods – my optimism is in asking, “Can we revisit what we have been doing, and can we regroup and re-conceptualize how we can create opportunities for students in different ways?”

How can we build a version 2.0 of the system that enables us to rethink the way we’ve been doing instructional, pedagogical, co-curricular [work], any of those activities?

How have rapid developments in AI influenced how the market views credentialing?

AI development is happening at a much faster pace than educational activities or integration, so there’s a lag there, But moving too fast can also have a downside, because if we don’t have good research and we don’t have good proven outcomes, then you’ve invested your infrastructure and resources and you have to go back to the drawing table.

Having some caution in that space is important, especially in the curricular and instructional spaces, because we know from research that it takes a while for the implementation of basically new strategies to show up in student performance.

Excitement about new technology is great, but excitement doesn’t correlate with performance.

We are publishing papers on this as well because we want to be at the cutting edge of this work, so as we bring AI-guided micro-credentialing [into the market,] we will make sure that our AI is not biased, that all students are being treated equally.

Bias has been a major concern in discussions about AI. What do you see as the risk for credentialing, if the tech isn’t applied correctly?

That’s really important. That means we have to do bias mitigation. You can’t eliminate bias in AI, but you can definitely do something to reduce it and mitigate it.

We want to create opportunities for institutions and students so that everybody gets to do what they want to do in a more efficient manner, in a more sustainable manner, and also create employment opportunities for students.

How do you prepare students for careers of the future when the role of AI in shaping the workforce makes that more difficult to predict?

Right now, the ongoing narrative is that AI will not replace your jobs, but the person using AI to be more efficient at their job will replace you. That might change. AI may replace jobs. We don’t know that yet.

But what will be very important, whether you’re doing AI-augmented work, or [working] without AI, is to make sure that those durable skills that we talk about — problem solving, critical thinking — are embedded in your day-to-day experience. You can’t just teach critical thinking with one course. It’s a practice. But you can give them the language to say, “OK, I did this. I had this experience.”

That’s what we are able to do, capture and document their experience. It’s a guided process, and then we’re able to tease out those embedded skills. The students say, “In this experience, I demonstrated critical thinking or problem solving.” And then we take that data and help them create a narrative.

What does that “narrative” accomplish?

Not only are we giving them credentials, we’re giving them language around their experience.

That’s empowering students to think. And everything is AI-embedded, so they can see a good example of how AI is helping them.

Eventually, we’ll make the behind-the-scenes [AI technology] visible to students so it becomes AI education in action. You’re not just going to a class to learn about AI, you’re seeing how this works and how I can make this happen in other spaces in my life.