One of Digital Promise’s driving goals is to enable historically and systematically excluded learners to achieve credentials that offer economic mobility and security over the course of their lives. Over the last year, Digital Promise conducted research, developed resources, and gathered courses to help learners grow in their professional journey.
In August 2022, Digital Promise acquired the Preparing a Global Workforce: Career and Technical Education (CTE) program from Asia Society. CTE educators face a critical imperative: to prepare all students for work and civic roles in a world where success increasingly requires the ability to compete, connect, and cooperate on an international scale. To meet that need, Digital Promise has partnered with organizations and other educators to develop professional development courses and resources that can help CTE educators incorporate global competence education into their work.
In “Micro-credentials for Social Mobility in Rural Postsecondary Communities: A Landscape Report”, Digital Promise conducted four in-depth case studies to explore how postsecondary institutions are using micro-credentials to create real-time career pathways for rural learners.
These innovations are:
The Kentucky Valley Education Cooperative (KVEC) provides free, competency-based flexible, professional learning opportunities for rural K-12 educators via micro-credentials.
The Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG) serves thousands of learners of varied backgrounds and reaches residents statewide, including those enrolled in adult education programs.
Tennessee State University (TSU), one of the oldest Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the nation, has a history of significantly contributing to the educational journeys of generations of Black populations across the urban and rural south.
The University of Maine System’s All Learning Counts–ME initiative aims to connect Maine’s most rural communities to gainful employment opportunities in growing fields of IT, technology, and healthcare via micro-credentials.
Learning and Employment Records (LERs) are comprehensive digital records of an individual’s skills, competencies, credentials, and employment history that may be able to show a complete picture of an individual’s education and work experiences.
Digital Promise partnered with historically and systematically excluded (HSE) learners using LERs to develop a set of design principles to help inform the development of LERs during an individual’s learning transitions. The report, “Learning Transition Design Principles for Learning and Employment Records: Co-designing for Equity,” shares insights from this collaborative work with HSE learners and workers and their recommendations regarding opportunities and challenges, which culminated in the design principles that support learning, career, and life transitions.
Over the past three years, Digital Promise’s Center for Inclusive Innovation has supported a cohort of local education agencies (LEAs) in a series of design studios and coaching to enable teachers of color to envision and bring to life solutions to pressing pipeline and shortage challenges by drawing on their expertise and lived experience.
The Center’s report, “Recruitment and Retention: Pilot Solutions Designed by Teachers of Color,” shares exciting solutions that have been co-designed and developed by teachers of color in partnership with school district leaders, building leaders, higher education institutions, and partners.
2022 Annual Report
