The Learner Record Gateway Project
Solving the “First Mile” of Institutional Record Sharing
The Learner Record Gateway project (LRG) project is taking the first step in sharing academic records: empowering students themselves to decide where their institutionally held academic credentials should go, while at the same time allowing credential granting organizations the ability to assure that only accurate and verifiable information is being shared. As its name implies, the LRG places a secure gateway in front of the existing campus systems where student record data is operationally stored. Through the DXtera’s open-source integration framework, institutional users and students alike, the two key agents in control of student record data, can share in authorizing access to individual academic records using an LRG suite of applications.
DXtera is seeking members who currently deploy the DXtera Integration Runtime environment, or those who are considering it, to join in a demonstration project to test the viability of the Learner Record Gateway. DXtera is also reaching out to potential investors who understand the value of shareable, digital learner records to help fund the development of the proof-of-concept Learner Record Gateway administrative and student applications, built on the foundation of DXtera’s open-source Integration Runtime.
There is an urgent need to build infrastructure to support the Future of Work. Significant attention is being given to the development of Learner Record Networks (LRNs) that can store and manage access to a lifelong learner’s many credentials in distributed and decentralized ways. This is evidenced by a growing number of global projects and products to tackle the problem of student agency over sharing their own learner records. Some of these involve traditional hosted data technologies, while others are pursuing distributed ledger and blockchain based technologies.
There are a few issues associated with these developing Learner Record Networks:
- Most efforts fail to address the “first mile” problem of how institutional records would be exchanged with any of these potential LRN technologies.
- Educational organizations should not need to choose which of these possible solutions to hitch their wagon to, rather they should seek to enable their students and alumni to choose with which LRNs to share their records.
- The need to support multi-agency control of learner records extends beyond LRN exchange, and educational organizations should not have to support separate processes.
The LRG will enable institutions to select vetted systems and vetted authentication providers, and enable their students to decide how and with whom to automatically exchange their credentials.
It is clear that students will be faced with a marketplace of solutions for managing and sharing their lifelong collection of learning evidence. For education providers, it all starts with accessing learning records residing in the systems where the data is operationally managed. Getting at those records, safely and securely, marks the “first mile” in supporting multi-agent control.
