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Launched in June 2026, the Democratizing Durable Skills Initiative is a partnership between Education Design Lab and Axim Collaborative that brings the Lab's employer-validated durable skills curriculum onto the Open edX platform as open educational resources. The initiative aims to make durable skills development and validation accessible to any institution by providing a scalable, low-cost model for colleges and workforce providers to incorporate skills including communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving into career and technical education (CTE) pathways, continuing education, and advising structures.
The initiative aims to reach nearly 60,000 learners across 120 institutions within five years and is hosted on the open-source Open edX platform. By hosting the Lab's curriculum on Open edX, the initiative makes the curriculum available to any institution at no cost and removes many barriers that have historically limited adoption of structured durable skills programming.
Durable skills are consistently ranked among the most in-demand competencies by employers. While these skills are widely valued, many institutions lack the infrastructure to teach and validate them, leaving community college students, adult learners, and high school students in career-connected pathways with no clear way to demonstrate these important skills to employers. Through the initiative, the Lab's curriculum is aligned to its Durable Skills Competency Framework and organized around nine microcredentials, each representing a core durable skill:
To earn a microcredential, learners must demonstrate proficiency through a performance-based assessment in four sub-competencies for each skill. Upon successful completion, learners are awarded a digital badge.
The initiative deploys the Lab's curriculum on the Open edX platform, a free and open-source learning management system originally launched by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2012. The platform is stewarded by Axim Collaborative, a nonprofit co-founded by Harvard and MIT that focuses on transforming education-to-work pathways.
The Democratizing Durable Skills Initiative launched with 3,700 learners across nine partner organizations, including Maricopa Community College, Northern Virginia Community College, Arkansas's statewide workforce system, and veteran-serving nonprofits.
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