Overview

In July 2022, four founding members established the Credential Futures Coalition (CFC) — AACRAO, 1EdTech, CBEN, and UPCEA. The coalition is composed of non-profit stakeholders working to develop a scalable, resilient, and sustainable ecosystem to support learner-worker mobility with a focus on career-relevant skills and credentials. The CFC is committed to cultivating the development and adoption of Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) / Learner and Employment Record (LER) tools. The organizations that have joined the CFC represent constituencies working to advance innovations in recordkeeping and verifications — Comprehensive Learning Records (CRs) and LERs—and share a common goal to support learners and assist them with codifying their verified learning experiences.

The CFC conducts meetings to explore ways to collaborate to achieve their goals, develop both short- and long-term visions for the future of credentials (5 and 10 years), and the identification of pilot projects that are most important among all stakeholders and that should be pursued in the short-term. The CFC informs the latter by surveying its members annually to produce an inventory of initiatives underway or in planning to inform its network discussions.

The CFC focuses on three priority activities:

• Best practices for embedding equity: Proactively create conditions now that will help stakeholders lead with and because of equity efforts.
• Measuring credential value:  Develop a framework that leverages skills as the currency of value for credentials.
• Demonstrate a sample exemplar career-ready credentialing program: Shared expertise and products can produce and share an exemplar career-ready program to help the academic community adopt CLR/LER as part of the competency-based curriculum evolution.

Partnership with Learn & Work Ecosystem Library

In May 2024, the CFC entered a partnership with the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library to enhance information-gathering activities. The Library will assist CFC in conducting the annual survey of initiatives underway by CFC members, and host the inventory of efforts at the Library’s Research Center (in Special Projects).  CFC members can update information on their efforts using feedback forms provided by the Library’s wiki model, and will have access to other resources provided by the Library (e.g., relational map on CFC efforts and others linked to CLRs and LERs; special reports generated by the Library).  

References

AACRAO Community  of Practice: https://www.aacrao.org/signature-initiatives/learning-mobility/digital-credentials/comprehensive-learner-record-community-of-practice

https://www.aacrao.org/who-we-are/newsroom/article/2022/07/27/aacrao-joins-the-credential-futures-coalition-as-a-founding-member

https://www.aacrao.org/home

https://www.1edtech.org/

https://www.cbenetwork.org/

https://upcea.edu/