Frequently Asked Questions About the Framework
1. Why is this Learner Information Framework needed? Who is asking for it and what pain points does it address?
We have the opportunity to create an approach that uses technology to bring together the rich variety of achievements that learners bring to education institutions and employment opportunities. The Learner Information Framework is rooted in the ideal that it is safer, easier, and less costly for institutions, employers, and learners to work together to help learners plan for and facilitate transitions.
Currently, learners, practitioners, and researchers do not have immediate ways to access information to help students navigate educational and workforce journeys that lead to better education and economic outcomes. For example, learners are not able to easily assemble and share a comprehensive picture of their learning in pursuit of educational and employment opportunities. This results from low and insufficient credit transfer; time-consuming processes to assemble records to apply for admission or jobs; no easy means to present a full picture of their experiences, skills, and achievements; and a lack of effective tools to help navigate and persist on their paths to degrees or certifications.
Those who support learners run into challenges, too. Advisors can’t truly understand a learner’s prior learning and experiences to inform their recommendations and support. State education agencies have to go through extraordinary efforts to build longitudinal records that ultimately do not have sufficient detail to understand what’s contributing to outcomes gaps for Black, Latino, and learners from low- income backgrounds. Similarly, postsecondary institutions struggle to design “learner-centric” services and processes based on a holistic understanding of their individual students.
2. Who is this being designed for?
This project is focused first and foremost on what will ultimately best serve the needs and goals of learners. To that end, it seeks to enable learners and those who serve them to easily assemble information into tools that position learners as the primary beneficiaries.
This project is oriented around learners in several critical ways:
It will leverage key elements of existing standards that describe learners and identify gaps where more comprehensive data is needed as indicated by learner feedback.
- Participants will work with lead partners to take a learner-centric view while developing potential use cases, prioritizing those that deliver the most benefits to learners.
- We will include and actively engage organizations and individuals that can represent the voices of learners in our advisory board and working teams
But as an infrastructure effort, many kinds of users will benefit. This effort helps learners, institutions, and employers work together in ways they couldn’t before to address long-standing challenges and make the most of new opportunities. It advances the education data infrastructure for a range of users, such as learners themselves, and education or training institutions that want to improve recruitment, prior learning assessment, retention and placement. We are also considering the needs of employers looking to improve recruitment, accelerate the hiring process, and provide training to their employees. We also see value for app developers who create learner-facing applications to help streamline processes and improve the user experience for applicants and employers.
3. How does this project relate to existing standards and harmonization efforts?
This project is not seeking to create a new standard for a comprehensive, longitudinal learner record. The focus of this 24-month effort is to prove the value of a new approach for how learner information can come together from many different sources on demand (e.g., for populating a learner record or feeding an advising application) using a common framework and tools. Significant strides in developing standards to improve sharing of learner information have been made in the past decade, but those efforts have addressed use cases focused primarily within organizations or specific educational sectors, or on a narrow scope or depth of information.
4. Does this replace or complement other efforts to develop Learner Employment Records (LERs), transcripts, and other kinds of learner data?
This effort seeks to leverage existing efforts to define vocabularies within education and workforce domains and anticipates extending the work of the T3 Innovation Network’s LER Semantic Mapping to specify translation between standard vocabulary terms, bringing them together to form a comprehensive, linked data model.
This project will also need to define a structure for composing and communicating complete or partial learner records; in its initial stages, the project will determine how best to extend or align with existing efforts to create interoperable LERs, transcripts, and similar constructs.
5. What is the long-term sustainment / support model for the Framework?
This project is a 24-month proof of value sprint, where the objective is to help provide facilitation and convening space for workgroup members to work through system design questions that people in the field are interested in answering. If the demonstration projects deliver value to learners and institutions, and the Framework and tools seem like the right starting point for further work, the project will be handed off to a resourced steward organization to manage maintenance of the data model and reference implementation code, govern extensions or revisions, and promote adoption and use.
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