A Consulting Story A Customer’s Journey Through Credentials Consulting

Aaron, if you have any, background music. Hello. Hello. Welcome. Everybody's trickling in. We're just giving it a few minutes here, letting everybody get settled in.

Thanks for joining. Feel free to let us know where you're from in the chat or the, q and a if you'd like. Welcome to everybody that's just trickling in. We're, we're about one minute out from a start, so, welcome. We are at three PM on the dot, so I think we are going to go ahead and get started.

That's good with our presenters here. Alright. So welcome, everybody. My name is Jason Gildner. I'm a principal product specialist here at Instructure, and I am thrilled to be moderating this webinar today, consulting, strategic services, and we have a bang up lineup for you from a presenter standpoint.

And we have, some real experts in the field, Aaron Mahoney Ross and Tim Mason. I'm gonna actually turn it over to them to introduce themselves in a little bit more detail. But before I turn it all the way over to our our presenters, just a couple of quick housekeeping items. The there is going to be a recording of this, particular webinar. It will be sent out next week, and it will also be posted to our website, next week as well.

So if you're looking for a refresher on it or if you join late, you'll be able to catch it up, later on. And, we will have folks monitoring the q and a as well. So if you have questions, for our presenters, please put them in the in the q and a. And with that, I am going to turn it over to our presenters so we can get started. Aaron or Tim? Alright.

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Tim Mason. And as it says on the screen there, I am a principal learning consultant with Instructure. I've been with Instructure for about four plus years now. And Aaron and I will talk about what strategic consulting is, in the scope of Canvas credentials.

I am a former educator and technology coach as well, and I'm currently living in Charleston, South Carolina from Seattle, from the high country to the low country, I always say. And as a consultant, what I really enjoy doing is working with people at all stages, right? Be it from implementation to adoption, to continuous improvement, to new programs, to new approaches, and just being a thought partner in general. Well, hi, everyone. My name is Erin Mahoney Ross. I am a program manager in learning services, and I've been here at Instructure for about two and a half years now.

And before that, I was a college professor at teaching English and liter composition and literature. And before that, I was a high school teacher teaching English and journalism. And I've taught in two states in, Phoenix, where I'm originally from, and then also in the Dallas Fort Worth area where I currently live. And during my time at Instructure, I began as a learning consultant. So, as Tim explained, just kind of working with customers throughout their journey with Instructure products.

And for the past year or so, I have been working almost exclusively with Canvas credentials and helping our clients get their credentials programs off the ground and, establishing their vision and all the things all the good stuff that Tim and I are gonna be talking to you about today. Alright. So our agenda today is what is strategic consulting? What does that look like for Canvas credentials specifically? And then what is a strategic consulting journey, which includes steps that we will return to over and over and over in the slide deck here because they're such an integral part of that journey and Canvas credentials. We'll talk about visions and goals, governance, taxonomy, implementation, standards and skills, communication and training, and your return on investment, your ROI, and engagement. All those parts of the consulting generally will cover.

And we'll also carve out time for a little q and a as well. Alright. So just to begin, we wanna talk about what is strategic consulting. What do we mean when we say strategic consulting? And so just to give you a little bit of background, if you've not worked with one of our strategic consultants before, strategic consulting here at Instructure focuses on the people side of change. We are interested in how we can help organizations adapt to the adoption of new products and, in this case, Canvas credentials.

And so we want to help you basically create a pragmatic plan to approach your goals. Most of us are former educators or worked in the education field before coming here, and so we know what it's like to be in a position where you're launching a new initiative. And so we have different ways of helping you kind of make your plan and succeed with that plan. And so sometimes that might take the form of enablement workshops, training in the platform, targeted coaching of all kinds, for specific items as well as big picture goals. We work with our customers side by side to develop things like communication plans, which you'll learn more about today, training plans, governance policies.

We also do customized strategic plan writing as well. And, ultimately, our goals are we want to increase the speed of your adoption. We wanna help you deepen your usage, elevate your usage, and we want to improve the overall student experience. That's why all of us are here. It's why all of us are educators to benefit students and to benefit their learning.

And so that's really our goals when it comes to, strategic consulting. So let's talk about what does that look like more specifically for campus credentials. And so we have a little graphic here for you to take a look at. And so, you know, I mentioned some of the forms that strategic consulting can take. And so with Canvas credentials, we wanna be your thought partner and coach through certain steps.

And so if you take a look at the little graphic here on your screen, you can see the steps to a successful implementation of Canvas credentials. And you'll notice at the very top of that stair, you'll see the badge issuing workflow. And, you know, Tim and I have spent a lot of time working with customers, and we know, Jason as well, everybody wants to jump into that step first. Everybody is excited when they purchase this product. They're ready to start issuing badges.

And before we can do that successfully, we have a lot of decisions that we have to make. We have a lot of conversations we need to have, a lot of things that we need to make sure we have everybody looped in on. And so they're actually there's a foundation we need to set. And so as part of strategic consulting, we work with you through those stages. So we look at your mission, vision, and goals and help you articulate that.

We talk about governance policies and what those look like. We talk about the hierarchical design of badges and how to implement badges. We look at how your badges will, use standards and skills alignment, and we talk about communicating that information and training out. And all of those items are foundational for that badge issuing workflow. And so we'd like to take you on a little journey today, and that journey is through one customer's sort of, process in this stair step.

So we, would like to introduce you to a very special client of ours called Panda University. This is a hypothetical client, by the way. Pandas are our, if you're not familiar, our little, Instructure mascot. And so this is actually based on, kind of a composite of the customers that we've worked with and some common experiences that they might have. So let's take a look at what, strategic consulting looked like for this this client.

And so, Panda University is a four year institution, with ten thousand undergraduates, and they hoped to launch a credentialing program that included a first year experience component as well as a data analytics certificate. And they wanted to make sure they had faculty training and professional development as part of that program. And, you know, among the stakeholders as is sometimes common, there were a variety of sort of feelings about this change. Some people really excited about starting a credentialing program, about digital credentials in general, some folks who were maybe less excited or even just not sure what it might entail or look like. And so this is kind of the situation that we started with, as we began their strategic consulting journey.

So, as you saw on the stair steps, the very first step there was the vision mission, vision, and goals planning. And so we started with them there. So we started by asking them things like, what is your why? Why are you here? When someone purchases Canvas credentials, they have generally a broad idea of what they wanna use it for. As you heard a moment ago, Panda University wanted to use this for their data analytics and first year experience programs. And so they did begin with that, but we wanna be more specific.

We wanna ask things like, you know, what specifically are we trying to achieve with these? Why are we doing this? Why why not just give a certificate, a paper certificate that is? Why do we need to make this a digital program? And really asking them to lay out some of their, ultimate benchmarks as well. And so we move from things like, vision to then goals and then success measures. And so we'll talk a little bit more about what that looks like. And so but we began with our vision planning. And so this is what this process might look like in strategic consulting.

So we began by asking them a couple of guided questions, and you you can see those on your screen here. I'll read them just in case you can't see them very clearly, but questions like, why did you purchase credentials in the first place? What is your purpose for adopting credentials, from the student perspective? What about from a faculty perspective? What about from a staff perspective? What are we hoping to achieve, through the use of credentials? Why are this is this change being made from the process that we currently have, And how did we how are we gonna communicate that out? Not just generally, but specifically to students, specifically to faculty, specifically to staff, as well as other stakeholders, which might include the community and or the governing board. And altogether through this work, which might take, you know, a couple of planning sessions where we talk through these questions, where they talk through them together. We were able to kinda come up with their ultimate, vision, which Tim is gonna share with you next. And I'm sure a lot of our audience has sat in on these same exercises.

Right? Like, what are our visions? What are our goals? What What are we intending to do, and how are we going to know that we were successful in doing that? Right? But vision's not enough. Because a vision, yes, it provides a destination, but you really have to focus on those actionable goals. And you have to know when and how you're going to arrive at that destination. So you have to figure out what milestones do you need to meet and to get there. You can see Paddington University's vision there is to offer the premier skills based data analytics program in the region, empowering students with practical expertise and real world experience.

I'll let you read the rest. Now this is one part of the three or four goals that Pana University was coming up with or their their vision, if you will. And then they were able to break it down because sometimes one vision statement, depending on the complexity of a program or what they're trying to achieve, may not be enough. Right? It may be able to capture everything, but then we may be have to break goals down further, and get more granular as we go through. One of the tools that lots of people use in organizations and the one which we encourage is the use of SMART goals.

Right? Those specific, measurable, achievable, relevant time bound goals. And there's lots of different templates, if you will, or guides out there if that's something that you may wanna do. But we like SMART goals as consultants because it really does give you an opportunity to address the skepticism and that may exist in your organization or some of the pain points or barriers that you might encounter. And it'll really bring about ultimately people valuing digital credentialing in the university as they go through. Now on the next slide, you know, we're gonna try to align goals, and the goals need to be parallel to the university's reputation as, in this case, Pan Am University, a forward thinking institution and one that really does an or really puts an emphasis on facilitating lifelong learning.

And that's part of their key core values and mission. And that's important. Right? As all these items are fleshed out, how do you align your credentialing program with those core values in the mission of your institution? Hey, Tim. This this question just came in. I'm just wondering if you could speak to it.

Do do you see a lot of schools or organizations aligning to their strategic plans that they have in place? Definitely. And going back to that vision board, if you will, or the planning board, whatever you wanna call it, the brainstorming board, That's where you could really apply that strategic plan there and use that as a starting point, almost an umbrella, as you flush out more of your vision for your credentialing program and those specific goals that you're going to hopefully have aligned with that strategic plan as well as you go through. Now we know a lot of those plans can be hyper complex, right, depending upon the size of the university, the department, specialized programs, your undergraduate, graduate programs, postgraduate, etcetera. And, you know, it may require a lot of crafting Erin, Erin, do you wanna add anything to that? No. I think that's I think you summed it up well.

And I often do have customers who they will they'll start with their own, broad strategic plan. That's a great starting point. And then asking a question like, how does this credentialing program fit with our strategic plan? Because that is something that you, you know, if you haven't articulated by the time you've purchased the product, you most certainly will need to at some point. So I think I think you covered it, Tim. Great.

So the the next logical step are goals. Right? And, you know, goals really provide that milestone or those checkpoints on that journey towards implementation and long term adoption and ensuring that you have quality control and you're constantly improving your credentialing program as you go through. Note here that in the goals that are laid out, how most of them are time bound. Right? There are time frames, which really help to provide a map, if you will, for the coming year or the semester or quarter, or maybe it's a two year plan, three year plan, whatever else it might be as we go through. Right? And once again, it can be aligned with your strategic plans too.

And sometimes it fits very nicely. Sometimes it doesn't. Right? It's square, peg, and round a hole. It all depends how you do that. And then once those goals are established, what needs to come next are those success measures.

And those success measures really help to tell us that we've reached our destination as we went through. So continuing on with this, right, and to reiterate our theme, right, vision, if you you can say this equals our destination. Goals equals our milestone. And success measures are that proof that we arrived at our destination. And if you are using that SMART goal model, you can tie it back to that.

But, you know, ultimately, you really need to know how you are measuring if you were successful, and what, metrics you're using. And there's as we know, there's a thousand different ways to look at the numbers as you crunch numbers and go through. And sometimes what people, I think, can get overly focused on is all the data and analytics that they're out there. I think it's important to start with those questions first when it comes to data analytics is what are we trying to know and why are we trying to know it? And sometimes that ties right back to our success measures too because otherwise we'll get lost in that tsunami of data and analytics that exists out there. Right? With all the various reports, all the internal and external systems that we can leverage in terms of measurement as we go through.

And with these example success measures for Panda University. Right? So what does successful completion of these goals look like? How do we define success as we go through? What could future success measures be? I think it's always good to have, a document that's running as things come up in conversations and meetings that you're capturing that future state because ultimately it could lead to like a whole brand new iteration of vision and goals, especially when you revisit your credentialing programs and policies, and you may need to realign everything as you go through. I think that you have to understand this entire process is very iterative, right? Because conditions and expectations change, but they all still need to have definitions and foundations to work from. So once we have our mission, vision, and goals, our next, step is to look at governance and a governance policy. And so a moment ago, you heard Tim talk about those success measures.

Right? How will we know if we were successful? And that plays into governance as well. And so the purpose of have of a governance policy, if you're not familiar with how we use this term, in credentials specifically, but we need a framework, a hierarchy, and a process. So how are we going to manage this program? What do the actual logistics look like? And this can be a very challenging, complicated step for a lot of of customers. That is something that really, often involves some internal conversations as well as coaching with us and oftentimes a back and forth approach and iterative process as Tim mentioned. So with a governance, policy, we're looking at things like, you know, who's managing this.

Right? So Tim mentioned, you know, talking to business partnerships to see if skills are aligned. He talked about, you know, what what data we're gonna capture. Well, who's doing that? Who's responsible for capturing that data and when? We discussed how Panda University has these two programs that they wanna start with, the first year experience and data analytics programs. What happens when we want to expand this? Who is approving it? What criteria do we have for approving it? What's the timeline look like? Even down to small things, like who is going to connect the issuer in a course that is going to be using it? What happens? Is there an evaluative process partway through where folks need to, you know, maybe course correct? And so we have to make all of these decisions or at least begin to make those decisions, and this is really essential because it helps establish uniformity, transparency, and consistency. And the the transparency aspect, I think, is really especially important because especially in a large organization, and as you can see, Purdue University is quite large, you know, with ten thousand students.

So you're gonna have a lot of communication that's gonna need to take place that that we'll get to a little bit later in this session. And having a very transparent process where first if you need a if you want a badge, you wanna have a badge made. This is these are the processes, these are the criteria for the badge, this is the timeline, having a discussion about who owns this project. Right? Oftentimes, that is a, small group of folks, from representatives from different parts of the organization, again, depending on how they're using credentials. So you might have folks, on a small committee from places like career services, from student affairs, from academics, from the registrar, from, professional development or teaching and learning.

You might have deans involved. So it really can vary depending on the institution and their norms. Sometimes the faculty senate becomes part of this governance, process at some point. And so, ultimately, we just kinda have to decide, how does this look? What does it look like, so that we can answer those logistical, those practical questions about the workflow and the ownership because it will make make things a lot simpler if we have that plan in place. So let's, take a look at what Pieda University came up with.

And, this might be hard to see on your screen, so I'll just kind of summarize it for you. But this is the process that they came up with, and I wanna make it clear that it is very normal a lot of times for organizations to come up with a governance policy initially and then adjust it over time because something isn't working or the program has gotten so big that the ownership needs to change or the process needs to be streamlined or simplified. And that's very, very normal, but having a place to start is really essential for then evaluating our success. Right? So what they came up with, for the future is that, it would begin with some requirements or interest. So, a faculty member would review the requirements for a badge, and we'll talk about how they came up with those, here in a moment.

And then they submit a proposal. So the proposal that, this Pana University crew came up with asks them to do things like, classify the badge, what type of badge it is, make sure that they've explained the earning criteria, give ideas on potential design. Next, a badge approval committee would review the applications and make recommendations. And And in their case, that badge approval committee included folks like, as I mentioned, faculty senate chair, representatives from different academic departments, the registrar, as well as the center for teaching and learning. That's what fit their particular, institutional norms.

And then once the, committee has approved the creation of this badge, the administration team would, these are the folks who actually work in the badging platform, begins the badge creation process as well as initiating any necessary training with the faculty members who are going to use it and or any students who will be receiving it. Then the badges are awarded and tracked, through Canvas. And then the evaluation process occurs a little bit later as well, which we'll we'll talk about. So that's what they came up with. And, you know, they're at the start of this process.

So they may find over time, for example, that the badge committee, it's too difficult to get everyone together and that maybe they need a simpler workflow. They might find that they need to add things to the proposal or have proposals go through deans. All of those things will, will happen in time and be there will be adjustments made in time as they start to roll out their program. And at Panda University, let's just say that people hear the word committee, and for them, it's a dirty word. Right? They think, oh, no.

Another committee. And one of the things we should make clear is you don't have to committee people by depth. Lots of times for a credentialing program, it'll fit neatly in another committee's task. Right? And what they may be already doing, as Erin mentioned, depends upon the different groups there might be that might be already involved in an existing committee. So keep that in mind.

At Penn University, you might have, like, for example, cadre departments who believe that, no. We don't need a digital badging program. Right? They think that there'll be too much more too many levels of bureaucracy, more inflexibility, and they might even have some concerns that you'll have policy misalignment with the norms of the university. And We'll talk about that when we get to expectations and standards. But you can see this continuous cycle here addresses all of that by by creating consistency and transparency and allowing for regular updates and reviews, that align with every evolving industry and subject matter standards as we go through.

And you can see how inclusive this entire governance policy is of multiple stakeholders at different levels too. Once you get past the launch phase with your credentialing program, then you can revisit this and really do a good audit or evaluation of the entire cycle. And that might occur, you know, once a year, twice a year, just depending on what you think an effective schedule might be. And then you can return to your goals and values and make sure that you are in on track and that your governance policy really supports that. Hey, team.

Does this does this change at all for organizations that roll out in smaller kind of maybe they don't go complete organizational wide or enterprise wide. Does this change, or is it are you seeing a trend where this still holds true even for the the the smaller rollouts? I can just speak to that having worked with large and small organizations. Everybody needs a governance policy even if you're a teeny tiny program because you may something you know, you you may not be available for it anymore. Right? So everybody needs a policy, but it may not be this complicated. It may be as simple as there's a single form that gets filled out.

Tim is the badge administrator and in charge of the project to make sure it gets loaded up and, you know, sent off. And it may be a one, a one man, one woman, one person shop in some cases. And that's, I that's perfectly fine. It's it's all about capacity, right, and, you know, the level of, ownership that is appropriate for that institution. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I I say every single person needs a governance policy.

In our own little training instances, we have we have a little mini governance policy on who can create new stuff. Amazing. Thanks. So, you heard us mention earlier, right, that they wanted to begin with rolling out two types of programs. Right? The, first year experience and the data analytics programs.

And I'll I'll put links in the chat to those pathways, that they finalize at the end of this process if you wanted to take a look at what those look like. But the reason I bring those up, as examples here is because the taxonomy and design process was really important to this. So if you're not familiar, I'm not sure how many folks here are higher ed or or have first year experience programs. But a first year experience program is typically a, freshman, oftentimes first semester or year long program that helps get freshmen acclimated to college life or college processes and to make sure they're engaged in the campus. And so, on their first year experience, you know, they have things like career center reviews and, you know, advising and and stuff like that.

And so the purpose of having that in a digital badging program is mainly for sort of excitement and to allow students to track themselves, for them to track the data of the students completing it. Probably not a ton of students putting the first year experience, badges, at least not all of them, you know, on a resume as compared to maybe some other programs. But still it's important. But, you know, you compare that to something like the data analytics program, which, you know, is a real credential. Right? It's an actual a a year long sort of freshman group thing and, you know, having a full certification.

And so those are both great uses of badging, but we wanna make sure that we have created a design and that we have created metadata attached to the badges that makes it clear that, yeah, there's a difference between, you know, getting a badge for something like, you know, having familiarity with campus resources versus knowing Python. Right? Those are very different, levels. And so as part of this step, we ask them to think about some sort of hierarchy or taxonomy for the different types of badges and talking about how do you differentiate between them. And, we'll show you some badge anatomy here in a bit so you can kinda get a sense of what that might look like. But and I also have a great link for you that I'm gonna put in the chat on taxonomy so you can read a little bit more about it.

So let me put that in the chat. And so there's a some more reading on that. But in terms of, Panda University, you know, they had to look at different things like what are the different levels of badges that we might offer. And I've listed here on this slide some examples of different badge levels that you might consider. And so, you know, completion, participation, performance, certification.

Those are all different levels of badges. They're all great uses of badges, but we want to make sure that we have, for example, differentiated a participation badge from a certification or license badge. Another thing that they would need to consider is the larger ecosystem of credentialing. Right? So, a badge contains skills, and but oftentimes, they're also part of larger stackable pathways. The pathways and skills become part of a taxonomy defined by that institution.

And in some institutions, we even go bigger. We we might have a learning and employment management record learning and employment record. Excuse me. And, you know, some governments are actually moving toward a digital wallet system that would have an inclusive record of all of a student's, you know, a repository of all of a student's skills and learning. So where does this this is where we ask them.

What types of badges do you think you're gonna offer? How would you differentiate those badges? And where do those fit in in the ecosystem? What is the ecosystem that you envision, not just for your own program, but for the students who you are serving? I was gonna say, I love this slide, Erin, because lots of times people hear the word badge and they think, okay. I just designed a badge and give it to people. Right? They don't understand the importance of aligning it beyond that and beyond their university or their institution. And all these nested levels are so codependent on one another to really make the badge the digital badge and the credentialing program, have value and long term value too, I'd like to add. And that comes up a lot as well with, you know, people who might be skeptical of a digital credentialing program.

You know, they might say, well, if we're offering a badge for campus resources, you know, how do we how do we even show that that's, you know, more valuable or more important? And, obviously, that is gonna be part of the badge data, but it's also part of the design and the way that that you set up, what the requirements are for creating those new badges. I gave you the links in the chat to the first year experience and data analytics pathways, but here's just a quick snapshot so that you can see it. And if you go to the links, you can see it in a little bit more detail. But here, you can see, for example, how the badge designs differ between the two different types of credentialing pro pathways that they're offering and also how they build on each other. So on that data analytics, for example, it might be hard hard to see on your screen, but each badge on the pathway has kind of a different color, and it has this hexagon shape.

And then the final one has some dimension to it, and it has a colored, shield as well. So it indicates some progression. And then on the first year experience one, we've got these gold sort of shield badges, but the final one has, again, a little bit more dimension in the design as well as the, little addition of those laurels on the side. Remember that all of these badges are gonna have metadata inside of them that are gonna explain exactly what a student did to earn those badges so that that makes it even more clear that they are different from each other. But having a visual, a way to visually differentiate them is also just a nice shortcut.

And it looks good on LinkedIn. Right? So design is an important consideration as we go through. Now in terms of standards and skills, which is the next logical step. Right? What industry skills and standards are relevant to our badges, your badges as an institution? And you might have some people who brought up those doubts as you started this credentialing implementation journey. Right? That the alignment of digital credentials with traditional academic standards lack the rigor.

Right? That maybe national accreditation bodies don't fully recognize digital badges. That industry expectations might overshadow academic independence or integrity, or there might be potential difficulties in maintaining consistent or high standards across digital and traditional credentials all the way through. But in our hypothetical situation, Hannah University decided that credentials are meaningful. And by messaging that out, am I going through their governance policy? They ensure that their credentialing system is respected by external organizations and employers, of course, building upon their partnerships that they might already have or creating new ones too. They may be aligning with national accreditation standards, and that, of course, enhances the university's credibility since campus credentials is verifiable and very secure.

And then as this step goes to, that it was all their badges and their pathways and their programs and all the alignment was designed with industry requirements in mind. And, ultimately, what that does is it ensures the students are more competitive in the job market, and it upholds the university standards and reputation they may be known for. And it provides a framework for that continuous improvement, as it goes back to that cycle. Right? As different credentialing programs are revisited or new ones come up. You can see in on this slide, we've grabbed some use cases here.

And what I like to point out is the way that each of these badges are aligned with key standards and learning scopes, if you will. Right? But, like, getting a credential, it's a software quality engineer, also encompasses Webex Webex web accessibility, quality control, accounting, quality insurance. And you can see how each of these particular fields encompasses different parts as well that are part of the key standards for that badge or for that credentialing program. So I mentioned the metadata a little bit ago, and, you know, kind of the the earning criteria, things like that. So on this slide, you can just see the anatomy of a badge.

And if if you're not familiar with using Canvas credentials, just to walk you through, every time a badge is shared, if if Tim is a student, Tim has earned a badge, and he shares it with, for example, an employer or on LinkedIn, that badge is unclickable. And all of this information on how Tim earned that badge, who awarded it, what was done to receive the badge. All of that information is is public. It's visible when that badge is then shared. And so you can see all the information that's here.

You can see, obviously, we have the badge image there, but you an institution could choose to classify their badge based on a certain type of, achievement. And so, like, this one, you may not be able to read, but the achievement site, types as assignment. There is some detailed earning criteria that's put in here. And so, you know, this criteria says something like the criteria for earning the badge includes completion of reading exercises, labs, and presentations related to learning Python basic programming, you utilizing pandas library for data manipulation, filtering, and aggregation, hands on labs and exercises that focus on Python libraries. It is also, in the top the top right corner, there's, it says offered by Panda University, and there's a verified link there.

And so that is what allows a viewer to see that this comes from the Panda University. It's not just, you know, Erin who, named her organization Harvard and, you know, is issuing badges for puppy snuggling. Right? This is what says this came from the verified organization, Panda University, so that it carries the weight that goes behind the academic institution, which is super important. I mean, that's we've spent centuries in some cases establishing that reputation. You can also see the skills that, Tim mentioned, you know, at the bottom, those are tagged.

Again, those are optional, but every bit of information that is put into the creation of a badge makes that badge more valuable to someone viewing it and someone holding the badge because of the specificity. And in this case, those skills are tagged, and they're actually linked. So they can, a student could even click on those skills and see relevant job postings that are, tied to those skills through whatever, EMSI library they've decided to link. And there's also an ability to put in alignments to national standards. You know, if you were doing an education program and you wanted to link this badge to, for example, a national board certification standard, you could do that through that badge as well.

So the again, you're getting a lot of information here that's gonna differentiate, you know, knowing Python for data analytics from a freshman orientation. And so it's that's why the open badge standard part, portion of Canvas credentials is so so important. And so, Panda had some great planning going on, here. You can see now they've established their processes. They've got some taxonomy going on.

They built their badges with some skills, but they're not done yet. And so the next stage of the process that we wanna talk about is how we communicate this. Once we've made these decisions, once we've established some goals, how to actually share that out with stakeholders in a way that makes sense. And that leads us to communication and training. And you can see the plan that they came up here.

Right? That it starts off with some training, some emails about the governance process, a public facing explanation of the badge process, and the governance for faculty and students, and recurring training opportunities, and one on one coaching. Now this looks nice and neat. Right? But, like, you know, sausage, we don't wanna necessarily see what went into it sometimes. But, you know, it all starts with a communication plan. And you might think we don't need a communication plan.

We're communicating all the time across our university. But it is essential to this, right, for a successful implementation. So if you're creating a credentialing program from the ground up or maybe switching from another platform, to Canvas credentials, you're gonna need to make sure that you really focus on the rollout communication and your training because we know change is not easy. People get grumbly when new programs, new initiatives start up because it disrupts their day to day way of doing everything and maybe even their long term goals. And you have to really value those explaining those changes in creating partnerships to foster that change in a positive way.

Right? And to make sure that you reach out to the people who might be naysayers and talk to them and address their concerns in any communication plan that you come up. Right? And if when your communication plan is intentional, it isn't just about notifying people about a change in your institution. It helps spread those visions and goals we talked about, and you can even share those success measures if you think that's an important part of your communication plan. The first part is identifying your audiences. And lots of times people think that that goes without saying.

But I like to say, you know, put on the hat of all your different stakeholder groups and walk through how they may read an email or see a notice or visit a web page and what questions they may specifically have. And plan it out because then you'll understand better how your credentialing program might affect each group. And, you know, your audiences are usually fairly self explanatory faculty, but you understand what a diverse group your faculty is as a whole or as a particular department, as well. Same goes with your staff and your administrators, your students, and all of your other community partners. Now when you develop your key messages, you really need to focus on how you're going to deploy those messages.

And each audience may need a different path or communication method. Right? And I don't wanna stereotype, but we know that our students primarily live and die by social media. Right? The apps of their choice, whatever those might be, depending. And they may need to be launched at different times. And those emails, those displays, those flyers, social media videos, etcetera, meetings, all those are different, ways to reach out to people, but some might prove to be ineffective.

So you really need to focus what will resonate with your particular audience as you go through. And then you need to focus who is sending that message. Because I think we all know that if we get a message from certain organizations or people, we may delete or skim over it. Right? So we need to make sure that there is central messaging that's going out. Maybe you could even do a generic email if that helps out and really have that tiered approach to communication.

And you hope that the people you communicate with will be in turn passing on to people who might have been missed by that communication. And the next thing to consider here as well is your frequency of communication. You may think, okay, we're just gonna send it out at the start of the school year or quarter of semester, and that's all we need to do. Right? But you definitely need to develop a timeline as you go through. And you need to make sure that your key messages include answers to those questions like, why are we adopting credentials? Why now? How does it benefit people? How will it affect you, specifically if you are crafting those messages for a particular audience? How are people gonna be supported? What happens when they run up against different barriers? Where can they turn for help? And then if you focus on that ease of use for credentials and the flexibility and the overall student experience, faculty and staff experience, then you'll get way more buy in too.

And I think it's important to bring up other options that may have been considered outside of credentials and why they weren't feasible or viable, right, within your environment and ultimately why you went with credentials. And I think it's good too to provide within your messaging quick video or GIF GIF overviews, right, or links for demonstrations, because then people understand what the visual element's going to be. And last but not least is your training plan. And you can customize your training options for each of those key audiences or sub stakeholder groups for that matter and use different delivery methods, be it async, hybrid, in person, one to one, whatever. And all that may actually start with the training needs assessment too.

And that's when you'll help to determine the content for those different audiences and embed that within your training plan. Erin, I think I saw your hand up. You know what? It was an accident, but, I was just gonna say, I think you I think you completely covered it. And I'll just add the which I was gonna mention anyway before this last section. But, you know, no two institutions are the same.

And I've worked, at three different colleges, actually, four different colleges, as an instructor, and none of them had the exact same culture even though some of them were within the same college district. They didn't all have same culture, the same norms. And so, you know, this part of the strategic consulting process, much like the governance part, becomes really a conversation for us to help you have those conversations with each other because we don't necessarily know what those norms are. I have some clients, for example, when they do their training, they go all out and it's goofy and it's themed and they have T shirts and they have maybe T shirt rockets and, you know, they have war prizes, and that's the culture at their college or university. Whereas others, you know, the culture is extremely formal or, you know, more asynchronous.

And there's no wrong way between those two. You know, if we try to come into, you know, and suggest to a very formal, you know, traditional style communication organization that you need to have, you know, T shirt rockets at your next meeting, that's not gonna go over well. And so this is why, you know, we really try at this point in the process to be a listener and to just give you things to think about, and ask help you to make those connections yourself between what you think will be successful, as far as communication goes. And that brings us to our last step. So this is the step everybody wanted to start at, starting to issue badges.

But as you can see, Panda had to go through all of these other, steps first to set that foundation. And so now we're ready to start actually creating those badges, issuing those badges, possibly connecting them to Canvas courses. And then as Tim mentioned, going back and evaluating the process, looking at those success measures, looking at that data that we determined was relevant, using our governance process to say who's gonna look at that data and interpret the data and what will we do with that data. And then there will inevitably be some changes. You know, we were, Tim and Jason and I were at InstructureCon recently.

If anybody else I don't know if anyone else was there. But, you know, at those sessions, our credentials customers discussed, some of them discussed this process and mentioned the same thing. You have something you start out with, and then as time goes on, maybe your program gets bigger, maybe there are changes in staffing, maybe your, you know, badge administrator moves to a different, you know, role. I mean, there's a lot of things that can happen, and this is an iterative process. It is something that we continue to refine.

I always recommend whenever possible to, you know, begin smaller with these programs, having pilot programs rather than, for example, rolling it out to every academic program on day one, maybe starting with one or two so that then we can sort of look at how this process is working and then adjust it as we start to scale our program upward. This is not you know, hate to use the, the a cliche, but Rome wasn't built in a day. Right? And so neither was a credentials program. It's it's not something that you can do instantly, but it is something that is gonna have tremendous value once you do it right. And so we wanna make sure that we evaluate this.

Panda decided they were going to do a an evaluation every year, at the, toward the end of the, traditional sort of spring semester. So, you know, around April of every year, they were gonna stop and evaluate and look at what was working and what wasn't. And, again, that might even change. Right? That timeline might even adjust as time goes on. And so we very much want to be a partner with you as part of this, and so I wanna share two more links, in the chat with you.

First one, I shared earlier, and I will put it in again for anybody who may have missed it. It's a link on just talking more about strategic consulting and what that looks like and some options. And then I also have two other really my favorite links for Canvas credentials. One of them, actually, they both come from our credentials blog. This one is our checklist for success, which, there is a sort of abbreviated version on our on our blog that I'm gonna share with you.

One second here. There's that credentials link, and then, the, checklist for success is just a great way to kind of walk through some of this. We use that to inform our own strategic consulting. And then I also have, a link to our blog generally, and the last couple of entries have actually been about mission, vision, and goals, as well as communication plans. And so, we talk about this, you know, specifically, in our last couple of entries.

So it might be of more interest to you if you wanna read more about mission and vision, or reading more about or read more about communication. We have some, material for you there. Amazing. Amazing. As we wrap up here, I just wanna open up the floor to some q and a.

So if you have any q and a, I'll just give you a moment to put any last minute questions that you may have in the chat. We do have a couple that I can throw your way while we're waiting for others to chime in. The first one is, really focused on, like, being agile with your badging program. And what does that look like, you know, when you start planning all of this at the beginning starting phases? Like, how can you ensure that your program is agile and not kind of in this rigid mode, and and how what are the best practices around being able to kind of ensure that you can change when the market changes? Personally, I think it goes back to the the governance pile policy, that diagram we showed. Right? It's like, at what stage could you revisit your standards and pivot, right, as things change? I think AI is a great example.

Right? For a computer science program, I'm sure at one point people were kinda caught off guard about the popularity of AI all of a sudden, and then a pivot had to be made for brand new programs, and that would have to be done during that cycle. And then it would have to be folded into new visions, goals, and success measures as it goes on. And I think too that may also tie in with the idea that, you know, a credentialing program can be as large and complex as you want to make it or something more refined and focused. And in either case, you have flexibility built in just as the way that you decided how your institution wants to go through the credentialing and pathways process for that matter. Awesome.

Awesome. There was also a couple of questions surrounding kind of the custom metadata that lives inside of a credential. And I'm just curious if you guys could expand on that a little bit around what you're seeing when you're working with with organizations. If you could provide some examples of kind of unique custom fields that you've seen that people might not have thought about. I'll start, just having having seen a couple of those.

I I know you mentioned, I believe, in the q and a or the chat, Jason, that, you know, they have I've seen some institutions that have used it to denote an academic, like, for credit course versus maybe a separate certificate program. I've also seen some creative uses of it, using custom fields to actually enter information that they need for tracking. Right? And so I've actually seen some institutions that have used it for professional development, and they've included custom fields with a certain number in it. And that allows them to track the amount of hours that it took actual seat time that it took someone to complete it. And so that's really interesting as well.

It doesn't do much from a metadata side as far as sharing it. But on the institutional side for tracking, it was a really creative way to, be able to track things like hours that people complete. And so the custom fields that you have access to in credentials allow you to really customize it to what you what you need. And I also think that, you know, you saw the example, from Panda University. You know, having that really detailed earning criteria also allows you to get really specific.

Awesome. Tim, anything to add there? I was I was just working with a client, yesterday about and they're a Canvas customer, so this doesn't apply to our entire audience necessarily. But they were trying to figure out, well, how could we mark our courses within Canvas when we know they're giving badges? Right? Because we have so many data, so so much data and analytics at our fingertips, and we wanna be able to parse that really quickly. And we came up with the idea of using their SIS system to code, the SIS ID number with certain kind of a nomenclature. And so when they run certain reports, they're gonna be able to compare that to credentials, data, and insights as well.

And, you know, they can mix it up depending on on what level of analysis they wanna achieve. And I thought that was kind of a cool way. It's not metadata, but still they're leveraging their other systems at the same time to really bring the two together. Awesome. And we just took in another question, and I can field it or you all can.

I'll let you guys decide. Can someone explain what groups are in the badging program? That I'll go ahead and do it. I'm since I'm unmuted already. I'll just mention, a group is a a cohort of people receiving, badges. And so a group can be manually created.

So, you know, if I have a group of teachers, for example, who are completing or faculty members completing various types of professional development, I can manually create a group of folks, and then I can assign a pathway to them or add badges to allow me to track them, in that cohort. When it is connect when credentials is connected to Canvas, Canvas, credentials will create a group for you of those who are in that particular course, and so that that step is done for you automatically when it's connected to Canvas. And so those groups can be archived at a certain date so that you can track, for example, a spring cohort of people receiving badges versus the fall cohort and so on. And in terms of pathways, Erin, do you wanna shed a little light on that in groups and pathways? Just how that plays a part. Yeah.

And so, you know, you can once you have a group, then you can assign that, pathway to a group, which will automatically place them on that and give them notification. And then that those and then that those, those faculty members will then be informed that they're on that pathway, that they've been added to it. They can go into their own credentials account and track their own progress as well. Well. Yeah.

And I can just add really quickly that we're seeing a lot of organizations get pretty creative. We have a a way to have one credential earned, and it will automatically add a user to a specific group based on that credential that they've earned. So it is kind of a a nice way to drop people into very specific groups based on different credentials that they've earned, and then they're automatically added to the pathway. So it's a it's a really clean, streamlined way to accomplish that with very low touch from actual, you know, administrators or things of that nature. Awesome.

It looks like we have come up with all the question or all the answers to the questions so far. So I think at this point, we will wrap things up. Thank you both so much for this. This was an awesome awesome webinar. And, again, the recording will be provided out to you, sometime next week.

And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to our team in the meantime. Thank you all so, so much, and I hope you have a great rest of the day. Bye, y'all.