The credentialing ecosystem is evolving, with newer credentials like microcredentials and badges taking center stage. But, change is not synonymous with positive growth. As we transform the credentialing landscape, what should our rubric for success be?
In this episode, we speak with Simone Ravaioli, Director of Academic Innovation at Instructure. His work focuses on strategic initiatives that advance learner-centric recognition systems and global credential portability. We sat down to discuss the next generation of credentials, how we maximize value for learners, and where he sees opportunities for impactful change.
Matt Sterenberg (00:01.142)
All right, Simone, welcome to the podcast.
Simone Ravaioli (00:05.361)
Hey man, thank you very much for having me.
Matt Sterenberg (00:08.684)
So I wanted to bring you on to talk about credential innovation. There’s no one better to talk about credential innovation than you, because you are just like so deep in this world. And it’s kind of like your life’s work a little bit. Like you’re very, very, very passionate. Give us a little bit of your background. How did you get into the credentialing ecosystem?
Simone Ravaioli (00:31.475)
It’s a bit of a life stories. I lived on my own skin, the challenges of being an international student and dealing with the admin struggles of having my credits recognized and the life experience of learning abroad. So that has really been one of the most significant learning experiences of my life. And it kind of serves the purpose of being so connected to this team when I get up every day and I go to work. So I feel like I’m
trying to address a problem that you know, that hurt for me, but also had a big impact in my life. So it’s good to be able to get to work through it.
Matt Sterenberg (01:13.048)
How have you seen credential innovation evolve or credentialing evolve? Like when you first started, like what was innovation then compared to what’s innovation now?
Simone Ravaioli (01:28.803)
I feel we’re moving across different challenges. And so as we solve one, then we face the next. So there is a bit of a linear progression around credentials innovation. One of the initial problems that we set out to solve was fraud. And fraud was connected to paper certificates in the beginning. so innovation really meant
starting a digital transformation. So swapping paper with digital. But ironically, and that is still sort of where we are. So there’s a digital transformation journey, which I think is part of the innovation. And yet, if you think about what’s happening today,
technology is coming back with a vengeance. if once, because we solved the diploma fraud problem by moving to digital and now digital, think of AI, AI is actually exacerbating the problem. So it’s digital coming back for us. So what do we do? It might go back in full circle, but you’re laughing, but I certainly have seen many times the need to
Matt Sterenberg (02:18.69)
What do you mean? What do you mean by that?
Matt Sterenberg (02:31.822)
Let’s go back to paper. Let’s go back to paper. Yeah. Yeah.
Simone Ravaioli (02:44.315)
have the paper twin. We were talking about the digital twin and there’s still a need for a paper twin. Why? Well, I think, well, first of all, paper was a technology for a long time. That was the most verifiable type of credentialing tech for a long time. And that was innovation at some point. But there are still some use cases where you might want to be able to print out a paper to transform the meaning
of the credentials into different shapes. So yeah, it’s coming back. think just like I hear, you know, when companies are hiring for people, they’re going back to like in-person interviews or they just, there’s this sense of going back to the human side of things. So innovation took us on a digital transformation journey, but now we’re facing new challenges. There is a quote, I think by Marsha McLuhan, which says, first we shaped the tools and then the
The tools shape us. All right. So I think it’s very much in line here.
Matt Sterenberg (03:45.262)
Mmm.
Well, that goes along with a lot of the previous episodes. You we talked to Ian Davidson a few episodes ago and he’s just talking about, you know, the hiring challenges and people are inundated with resumes and candidates because it’s so easy to apply to jobs, to create a resume that’s unique to this position. And so they’re using technology in order to like get scale in terms of applying and then
the employers are trying to use AI to weed out candidates that are using AI to be able to apply. And so I think you’re right. Like there is this, the technology is so great now. How do we actually control it rather than it controlling us? Like, as you look at the landscape, like we talked about preventing fraud initially, where do you see
the most impactful pieces of credential innovation in the future. Like where do you hope we’re going with credential innovation?
Simone Ravaioli (04:58.327)
There is an arc, right? Of possibilities that really, you know, go from just aligning policies, technologies and practice. And this is all in service to learners, hopefully. So a lot of the plumbing that we’ve been building, the infrastructures, the technical standards have to go really hand in hand with
with serving learners. And sometimes I feel that our rush toward innovation has left learners behind unintentionally and against our narratives, which are learner-centric. When you look at innovation, typically, I you can innovate in a couple of ways. You can either say lower the floor.
to make something that is make something more accessible to everyone, lower the floor. Or then you raise the ceiling. You just make something that was impossible possible. I think we typically look at making the impossible possible with new emerging tech. You look at blockchains or AI now. But sometimes we forget that there is another way to innovate, which is just lowering the floor and make this technology more usable, more useful.
And that is really what learners want. And I’ve been part of this journey, you know, many colleagues and while we get excited about the new tech and the emergence of the promise that we’re going to solve more problems, we sometimes go side of making this new tech, this new innovation very, very easy to use and look at the everyday lives of
of learners or people that are using these tools. Because, you know, I think if there’s anything, you know, we really build the plumbing, but we’re not doing a good job, I think, in creating the right incentives or make, you know, or the sense of making functional at all, meaning can these credentials really unlock opportunities, which is really core to what we’ve been doing in a parchment and now in structure and across the journey, essentially.
Matt Sterenberg (07:18.434)
I’m glad you brought that up because that is one of the criticisms I have of the credentialing ecosystem at times, which is, and all technology to a degree, but it becomes a huge focus on the plumbing, right? And people forget, how do we communicate what this is? How do we communicate the value of this? How will learners actually use this?
How will it actually create opportunity? Do employers know what this is? We’re so concerned about, can we build this, the plumbing, the ecosystem, the data standards, all this other stuff. And we kind of forget that a learner graduates from college or a certificate program. They don’t care what a data standard is. They don’t care what the plumbing is. Can I use this credential? Is it more portable? Is it more accessible?
and does it create an opportunity for me instead of, you know, is it interoperable with the student information system or LMS, whatever else, all of that is important, but not to the learner. And there’s an economy of information that we have to have with these credentials, right? We don’t want to have to explain, this is a open badge standard 4.0, like we don’t want to have to do any of that.
How does this help me get a job or how does it help me get a raise? And it’s easy to lose sight of that often, right? Like we, cause we don’t, you know, we’re just building these things without the learner in the room a lot of times, right?
Simone Ravaioli (08:58.713)
It cracked me up, Matt. think so we are not we’re currently in version three of Open Badges, right? And so
Matt Sterenberg (09:04.875)
I was just making it up, Simone. Don’t call me on it, okay?
Simone Ravaioli (09:06.735)
My prophecy is that the Open Badges 4.0 will be the paper version of an Open Badge. No, is demissifying innovation. I think it’s very healthy that we have these conversations. We should move from the storytelling of credentials to the story doing of it.
Matt Sterenberg (09:15.682)
This is like the opposite of credential innovation conversation. We’re just advocating for more paper. Yeah.
Simone Ravaioli (09:34.675)
And if you want to start doing it at scale like we are, I mean, we have the responsibility of serve a large ecosystem of members, partners, they might all be in different stages of this journey, right? And so we don’t want to leave anyone behind. They might all need different types of innovation from paper to digital or doing more with digital, know, being able to
connect data into a knowledge graph and connect all the skills of the words and then automatically being integrated into HR management systems. And so it is easy and a bit popular is to be able to work always at raising that ceiling and on the next wave of innovation. But that is if you’re selling a proof of concept to customer zero.
When you have to maintain and make sure that everyone gets the job done and learners are happy and can use the credentials across regions, across different technology types, you have the responsibility of, yeah, mean, to serve everyone. And that sometimes comes at the expense of leading that innovation race or having the coolest thing to say. But I think, you know, we are in a different business after many years.
We recognize that we are in the conversation, in the bleeding edge conversations. And I think the way we bring maturity to the innovation race is by trying to ask the right questions and elevate the level of the conversation by sometimes, yeah, pushing back or maybe with a little bit of irony, if you will, just.
print the reality checks and think like, do we really need to do if innovation has to be available to everyone, if we want to optimize the impact. yeah, that comes at the expense of not always looking at the next shiniest thing.
Matt Sterenberg (11:48.974)
I love the way you phrase that innovation that’s available to everybody, right? Cause when you talk like the word innovation, we think about it often in a technological sense, not in terms of like accessibility. We don’t kind of, we would say it’s accessibility, but we wouldn’t say it’s innovative. But I think that’s where we have to define like what is innovation and
Too often we view it as a technology thing, but isn’t the true innovation the one that like makes people’s lives better, that makes it more learner centric, that gives learners way more access? But that’s a good segue and you’ve hinted at it, but like what are the characteristics of the credentialing ecosystem or credentials that are learner centric or a platform? Like what makes something learner centric? How do we…
Like what’s the rubric we need to use to say this is or is not learner centric?
Simone Ravaioli (12:57.267)
I think it’s counterintuitive to the learner-centric narrative or principle itself. Something that is very learner-centric is very useful to a learner. mean, it’s very easy to use. They want to adopt any new technologies to do it. They would not have to download any new digital wallets to their phone.
If it creates utility, that is learner-centric. If whatever we introduce under the guise of innovation has the same level of feature, in technical terms, sometimes we refer to feature parity. So if you want to change the behavior of a learner taking into the so-called new innovation space, which we define, not for them. I think in literature, is a…
an index that says that, to change the behavior of a user, you need to make something new 10 times better. So like, are we, I think sometimes we struggle to bring that to realization. We, under the claim of learners, we introduce new technologies that doesn’t even have a feature parity, let alone being 10x better for the learners perspective. And so they’ll still ask us for paper.
or they’ll still ask us, we share that on LinkedIn as easily as before? Why is even learner centricity in the innovation space in credentialing at least has really become one of the flagship principle for decentralization or self sovereignty, which in itself is a great thing. However, I feel that that kind of innovation sometimes has come at the expense of utility.
And so there’s a tension and a trade-off between sovereignty and utility. And I feel that true innovation for all learners would be on the utility side less than the sovereignty. Whilst no one is ever going to get fired to say, hey, we’re going to give you more sovereignty. You’re going to own your data. But what can you do with it if you cannot even share it forward, just like you would do it before, push it on LinkedIn as easily. Now, this is a conversation that are not very popular.
Simone Ravaioli (15:16.071)
I guess in the innovation space, but I think more and more we need to have again, because to your question, like how do we make this stuff very like learner centric as in it brings value to the learners, not to us who build the platforms, not to anyone else needs to verify them. So to the learners, to some extent, I think we’re still very much credential centric and not as learner centric as we would like to be.
Matt Sterenberg (15:43.372)
Yeah. And ultimately there are like the challenge that we’re going to run into is going to be, okay, let’s say the learner completely understands what they’ve earned, what their credentials are, and they have access to them and the ability to share it.
Okay, now we’ve got to share it with employers because that’s really like we I think there’s kind of two camps and credentialing like one person who’s like, you know, credentialing is important because it’s a recognition of learning. That’s a critical pedagogical activity, right? Letting people know what they’ve learned, whether or not it leads to something is an important activity. And I would agree generally. But credentials are currency, right?
We pay to get credentials most often, right? And we’re getting them not just to learn, but to get another opportunity. So do employers understand what this is? So let’s say learners completely understand. How much do we have to rely on them to communicate? Hey, I understand what I have. Let me tell you about it. And how much do we have to work with the employers or workforce, the labor community?
for them to be engaged in this conversation, that is still going to be a challenge, even if the learner has kind of complete autonomy over their records and access and it’s completely usable, we still have to include them in this conversation. And that’s one of the challenges we keep running into is how do we include them in this dialogue and use them as a feedback loop?
You tell us what you think is valuable, right?
Simone Ravaioli (17:34.531)
This is fundamentally puzzling a lot of people on both sides of the equation, right? On one hand, I think
We now have one of the innovation that I think we don’t, we don’t talk about enough. It’s, it’s not really a technical innovation, but it’s about recognizing that all learning matters and making all that learning visible. And technology is there to help us do that. So these are use cases that are not the conformance use cases that we typically work with, you know, formal recognition of formal learning. but more and more.
We are admitting that some of the formal degrees are losing currency. Employers want to know more, have a better look at.
Matt Sterenberg (18:28.184)
What is a degree? Like, what did you actually learn? Yeah.
Simone Ravaioli (18:31.919)
And so the proxies become things that you do outside of your work. The co-curricular activities, like we’re trying to package them in comprehensive learner records now. Like employers try to like tend to hire for fit and then train for skills. So some of those narratives are really speaking to a different kind of innovation, which is on recognition itself. So it’s more of a policy innovation. Sometimes, you know, in other circles, we call it open recognition. And so the technology that we’ve built, and this is
great part, great, a great thing about this credential innovation stuff is that it can cover all use cases. Now, the, the, when people look at your credentials and try to understand it, they’re also struggled because the other force that is playing here is that we live in a data intensive time. And so we have maybe even one too many of these credentials. And so the, the, one of the opportunities become
can we empower learners to curate their learning, you know, more than collect it, just collect it and curate it and present what matters the most for a specific use. You want to get a job, you want to be admitted to a PhD program. And so the additional utility that we need to have is how do we help learners start that story and provide stronger signal instead of
adding noise to bumping all this, you know, my LinkedIn profile to you and there go and figure it out. Most of you, we stop at thinking, is that credential verifiable? Right? Is that, did you really get that? and we’ve done a lot of work on that, but I think we have not done enough work on the true, curation side or the, ability to articulate this.
and on the other side, I mean, the employer to make sense of it. So there is fortunately still a lot of work to do, which goes the way, it goes beyond verifications and transportations and portability and compliance or performance.
Matt Sterenberg (20:47.288)
Simone, this has been a ton of fun. I’m gonna give you the last word. Is there anything that you wanna highlight related to credential innovation? Anything you’re excited about? I’m gonna put the pressure on you to get people excited about the future of what this is. I’ll give you the last word.
Simone Ravaioli (21:11.123)
I think there’s a paradigm that I’d like to share with everyone, which is to understand innovation, but also more broadly to try to make sense of the times that we live in. And it’s the paradigm of complementary opposites, which effectively says that we should be resilient and to stand the course of time or the acceleration of time in this case.
innovation that is hitting escape velocity and our ability to still bid stuff that is useful. So there’s a tension between zero and one, like paper and blockchains. And that tension is not one to be resolved. I think the skill of the future for us is for us to be able to contemplate both polar opposites and everything in between.
So it’s a journey. It’s fine that if you have paper which solves your problem, it’s fine if you want to do blockchain because you need that immutable verification. But the name of the game is not resolving that tension. It’s actually keeping that tension in tune. Because at end of the day, tension is flow. And it’s a source of energy. Any musical instruments play his best when it’s tuned right.
And so it’s not about resolving the tension or polarizing in one technology camp or another, but it’s to have the resilience to continue to stand on this journey, to try to make learners’ lives better, issue credentials that are ever more useful without really taking sides and just really to be able to contemplate what doesn’t necessarily make sense, but that’s…
probably the most important functional sense making. So complementary opposite, everyone.
Matt Sterenberg (23:12.088)
Simone, really appreciated this conversation. Thanks so much for joining me.
Simone Ravaioli (23:16.797)
Thank you, Matt. Thank you very much. Hey, everyone.
