About Digital Promise
Digital Promise is a global nonprofit working to expand opportunity for each learner. We work with educators, researchers, technology leaders, and communities to design, investigate, and scale up innovations that empower learners, especially those who’ve been historically and systematically excluded.
Our efforts are multifaceted and grounded in the real-world challenges facing learners and educators—from working to expand K-12 students’ access to high-speed internet, to providing adult learners with opportunities to earn micro-credentials that further their careers and secure their well-being.
About Micro-credentials at Digital Promise
The Digital Promise micro-credential initiative has led the field through contributions of our research-backed, equity-focused framework that has been adopted across the industry. Our research and reports guide organizations, companies, institutes of higher education, and states, districts, and schools across the country to support the design of robust and scalable micro-credential systems with meaningful recognition and incentives for learners. Further, we also advocate for policy to support incentive structures and widespread adoption of micro-credentials at the school, district, state, and national levels.
The Digital Promise Micro-credential Platform has the most comprehensive micro-credential library of its kind and the largest public platform serving the education field. Since its launch in 2015, it was the first-to-market with a focus on K-12 educators. Since then, we have offered more than 800 competency-based micro-credentials on a wide range of research-backed skills. We have worked with more than 100 issuing partners who are experts in many content areas. With more than 40,000 registered users, we have awarded 24,000+ micro-credentials. As a testament to the quality of our work, almost 40% of our micro-credential earners have received 11 or more badges.
As a nonprofit with a focus on supporting historically and systematically excluded learners, Digital Promise has developed practices and strategies that have positively impacted the digital learning ecosystem. We have led national conversations on quality assurance in the micro-credential space, addressing the growing challenges around quality content and assessment. We have also contributed to the development of a set of micro-credential design, assessment, and implementation principles that were published in January 2020. Digital Promise has also joined multi-state partnerships aimed at identifying “opportunities and challenges across states and developing model policy recommendations.”
We are focused on how to enhance and scale the micro-credential platform as we continue to support historically and systematically excluded learners of all ages. Moving forward with new issuing partners and micro-credentials, we are looking to support all types of learners, with a particular focus on workforce, postsecondary, and K-12.
