Making Sense of Certificates, Certification and Badges: A Hiring Manager's Guide

You might have seen image posted on SlashGeo.

 It prompted the Twitter conversation below.

I don't  believe the writer who posted the certificate misrepresented how one can complete a (free) Esri course and receive such a certificate. And, I'm not sure if Mr. Fee was really confused about the difference between a certificate of completion and Esri's formal, test-based Associate and Professional Certifications. 

But the interchange does highlight how a potential employer, especially one not conversant in the GIS/Esri/Education lingo regarding GIS recognition, might be. Employers would need to know about certificates of completion (like the one above, saying a course was completed), industry certifications (GISP, ASPRS), educational institutions' certificate programs (Penn State Post Baccalaureate Certificate), and vendor certifications (Esri's Certification program).

Free Education, Badges and other Credentials

And, now of course, we have a whole new set of credentials that may make their way to GIS: badges (for example from Mozilla or Khan Academy) and letters from instructors for those who participate in massive online classes (for example, the Stanford AI class). All of these (mostly free) learning and credential collecting opportunities tend to have as part of their mission making "education available to all." Khan Academy basically adds the term "world class" to that to define its mission statement. I can find no fault with efforts to bring education to all.

There are many issues to be resolved with badges and other credentials; I want to set that aside for right now and focus on these free learning opportunities. Who are they for? Ideally, they are for anyone who wants to learn something "new." Audrey Watters (my favorite edtech writer/podcaster) is currently taking a massive online Python course. Among her fellow students? Those who program in Python for a living! Moreover, she reports that in the course forums there wasn't quite the respect for "newbie" questions as she might hope. Why are working professionals taking the course? I can only guess, but fear one reason might be to gain the credential at the end. It's a way, as the SlashGeo poster put it, to "help you pimp your resume." 

Advice for Hiring Managers

Pity the overworked hiring manager who gets a pile of resumes and has to navigate all these certificates, certifications and badges! What is he or she to do? Ask a lot of questions. 

If the applicant hasn't provided a reference to explain the nature of credential (say a link to the GISCI website), the employer should ask about it either in a phone or personal interview. Ask the applicant who granted the credential, what is means, what was required to attain it and why they pursued it. 

That last one is key and can reveal a lot about the applicant. I'd love to hear an applicant who took one of Esri's free three hour classes explain they did so because they were taking a university course that included the topic and didn't quite understand the key points. I'd love to hear that an applicant was working on a project (for work, school, or on their own) and needed to know how to do that specific thing to complete it. Other answers, such as "I don't know," "I don't remember," or "to pad my resume" would not be as promising.

As more and new types of credentials appear on resumes, hiring managers, the consumers of those documents, have to dig deeper to tease out their value. Alternatively, they could ignore the credentials and administer a test or assignment to see if the applicant has the skills.

There's Nothing New Under the Sun: Not Even Khan Academy

There's a great post at the Mathalicious blog about how Khan Academy is taking over the psyche of many in and outside the education world. Many think it's "the" answer to the education challenge in the U.S. and around the world. But the truth is, as the author explains, it's the same type of teaching that's been done for decades, just via free videos. And, the free part may be its biggest limiter: it's free, so it might be determined to be "good enough" and restrict educators from seeing something better.

The author (and I) are not haters of Khan Academy (KA). I'm a fan, but see KA's short informal video lessons as part of a new vision for teaching and engagement. I agree that the KA lessons do teach, for example, the concept of slope, the same way my parents and I saw it taught. I don't think we need to toss that method out, but rather, use it as one way to introduce the key ideas. For some students that x,y axis, rise over run idea will make sense. But what about those for whom it does not?

The Mathalicious post got me thinking about how we teach geography and GIS. Was I taught geography the same way my professors and their professors taught them? I suspect the lecture, assignments, and tests, were quite similar. Do I teach my students the same way? I've certainly drawn on my teachers ideas, exercises and visions. But, I've been lucky enough to have quite a bit of freedom to determine the goals of my courses and the lessons and assignment in which my students participate to achieve those goals. In the era of online teaching I have something my teachers did not: the Web. I and my students have all of the resources of the Web and I try to take full advantage of those. I also have all of the resources shared by other educators (on the Web!) about engagement techniques. I far prefer my role online as "guide on the side" over "sage on the sage." Moreover, my students do, too.

I wonder if GIS is taught the same way it was when I learned ARC/INFO in 1992? This was at ESRI HQ. The three day course involved segments which included a short lecture with slides, then having students in pairs trying hard to key in command line text to follow the "recipe" in our workbook. At the end of the three days we were expected to do a project. My partner (from Danish Hydro, I still remember!) and I did not complete the project and I was left with quite a headache. Now, of course, the command line interface would include WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointer) so that part would be easier. But is the teaching itself be any different? (Esri cited some new techniques in 2010, but I've not heard any more on this effort.)

The biggest challenge educators may have in enhancing today's efforts is separating our vision of teaching from past visions. One of my instructional designers (thanks Khusro) was always prodding me to redefine any rules to better fit the goals of the course. "Just because every other course has assignments due on Tuesday night does not mean your class must." And so, we set a schedule for my graduate students such that assignments were due Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays each week. Yikes! And yet, it worked!

We need to be brave and take chances and find what's new and what works, under the sun. And then, we need to share those best practices.

A Geographer Looks at EdTech - Part 6 - Khan Academy

--- This post is the sixth in a ten part series examining top 2011 trends in education technology in the context of GIS and geography education. ---

The sixth theme Audrey Watters identified in her top ten list of ed tech for 2011 is the rise and popularity of Khan Academy. She details the non-profit's beginnings and details its free repository of math and science videos. She goes on to note its growth to include exercises, rock star tech and education hires, more funding and all the buzz its had in the media.

Part of the buzz around Khan Academy is about how videos might be used as homework. The vision of the "flipped classroom"(IE post) involves students watching videos (or being introduced to new material in other ways) at home and then doing what used to called "homework" at school with peer and teacher support. Khan didn't invent that vision, but helped market it.

I love the ideas behind Khan Academy but am not so naive to think they will solve all our education challenges in math or other areas. I like these aspects of the Khan vision:

• Bite-sized, homey videos that can be watched again and again
• Open model means videos are under a Creative Commons license and Khan-used tools are open source
• Real educators are building out an arts and history curricula
• The flipped classroom means student have help at hand in "the doing" part of learning, not he passive part (aka the lecture)
• Non-profit status can help limit too rapid growth and hopefully mis-use of government funding

So how do the ideas of Khan Academy relate to geography and GIS education? That was a jumping off point of my keynote at the NEARC Edu event (IE post) this year. I imagined a flipped GIS course that had no lectures. Instead, students watch videos, read tutorials, etc. at "home" and do "labs" during class. Those labs, I'd imagine would be noisy raucous places where students work together and interact, unlike the deathly quiet ones I've seen. Is the geography community ready to build its library of videos for such a vision? Do they already exist?