byAudrey Watters, Inside Higher Ed
A number of initiatives and startups are hoping to offers ways to give people some sort of formal(ized) recognition for their informal learning – or at least for the skills they possess for which they don’t have official diplomas or degrees. Among them: Mozilla’s Open Badges project, the social endorsement site Skills.to, the soon-to-launch Degreed, and the open-to-the-public-just-today LearningJar. There seems to be a lot of buzz about these in the tech industry in particular — due to the high demand for workers with programming skills, due to the feeling that a college degree in CS doesn’t always mean someone has those necessary programming skills, and — of course — due to the concerns over the high cost of higher education. And even if there weren’t headlines and hand-wringing about the “higher education bubble,” these efforts do make sense: a college degree isn’t necessarily the best or only indicator of a person’s skill-set.
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