Degreed: tell me about your education

If I asked you to tell me about your education, would it involve you telling me where you got your degree?

This is a question often posed by David Blake, the founder of the startup Degreed.com. He makes a great point that when people are asked about their education, they often respond in the context of the university they attended and consider their education to have been completed with a degree. But Degreed is “jailbreaking” that mentality and the status quo of how learning is measured, validated, and packaged.

Now just what is Degreed? "Degreed is a community of college students, professionals, and lifelong learners dedicated to advancing their education. When you join Degreed, you get tools to help you track, organize, share, and validate everything you learn." (Degreed.com).

Just for fun, I signed up for a (forever free) account. From my bit of exploring, Degreed is basically assigning a point value to your formal and informal learning, everything from a degree earned to an article read. You input your learning experiences and Degreed calculates a score. For my degree in education, a Google Summit, and the past two years I have been teaching at my current school, my score is at 3450 points. What that really means to me or a prospective employer? I don't know yet. What does it means to the Colorado Department of Education? Nothing. But I really hope that someday it does. It would save me a lot of trouble trying to track and calculate all the professional development hours I need to renew my license every five years.

I must digress to tell you how happy I am to see universities and their degrees get disrupted. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have a degree and even happier to pursue my master's. But there has got to be a better way or as Blake puts it, "valid currency". Back in the olden days, a university degree guaranteed you a stable career and financial success. That's not the case anymore, and you’re lucky if you don’t come out $40,000 or more in the hole. That’s if you were even able to go to college in the first place. Not to mention the notion that your education should continue well beyond your early 20s. If someone has figured out how to do that, more power to them!

I have some questions about how this all works at Degreed… and I have questions I don’t even know I have. I would love to see a FAQ section on Degreed.com as I’m pretty sure a lot of people have similar questions. One big question is: Are we ready for this kind of divergent thinking. I am. What about you?