By Autumn Walden, Editor, AACRAO Connect, Content Strategy Manager, AACRAO
Innovation in education often happens at unexpected intersections. Our interviewee, Noah Geisel, the host of “Credential Chats,” is bringing a session format twist to this year's Annual Meeting: imagine a Spelling Bee, but instead of spelling words, participants must define the latest terms in digital credentialing. Think you could define “verifiable credentials” on a dais? No word yet on whether a bell, gong, or gold stars are involved in “Explain It To Me Like a Fifth Grader: AACRAO's Credential Innovation Definition Bee.” But that's just a glimpse into the creative mind behind “Credential Chats,” where making sense of digital badges and verifiable credentials becomes an adventure rather than a chore.
During our discussion, we reminisced on those golden days of Twitter when digital conversations flowed naturally, and you could actually banter with thought leaders without fighting through layers of strategy and disinformation. This same spirit of authentic connection drives his innovative approach to demystifying digital credentials for implementation. Geisel's work also inspires others to act. “I launched our micro-credentialing program in August 2024, uncertain of how it would turn out,” Regina Middleton, TCU Assistant Registrar, said. “Now, after reviewing my student workers' projects and reading their written reflections, I’m amazed at how much the program has contributed to their professional development. Seeing the impact it has had on their growth is incredibly rewarding.”
We're exploring these ideas and more with Geisel as he prepares to launch the third season of “Credential Chats” on YouTube on Monday, January 27, 2025, at 4 p.m. ET. And when he's not redefining how we think about digital badges or orchestrating credential-themed conference sessions, he's dreaming big about the future of The Badge Summit, a conference he started that is now in its milestone 10th year. His latest mission? Trying to recruit the executive director of GitLab Foundation to join the conversation.
What recurring themes or concerns about digital credentials have emerged from your conversations with guests during the first two seasons that particularly resonated with your audience? What questions still remain unexplored?
Geisel: It’s striking how we can explore very different topics and still have common themes emerge. I think the top three for our audience are:
- Stay student-centered, and you’ll probably be on the right track.
- This stuff is all about learning records. When it comes to learning records, institutions need AACRAO members to be leaders with technical expertise, change management, and best practices for information management.
- Credential innovation is leading to an exciting new reality that will expand the reliance on and use of trusted, verifiable learning records.
That last trending theme is a big one—we must continue exploring and socializing for members. We’re going to experience a massive change in a lot more people accessing learning records, and accessing them a lot more often.
The intersection of traditional academic credentials and emerging digital verification technologies creates opportunities and challenges. Where do you see the greatest innovation potential based on your experiences hosting the show, and what are the most pressing concerns that need to be addressed?
Geisel: The opportunities for innovation are vast, and we probably haven’t even imagined most of what’s possible. I’m really into thinking about this stuff through the lens of ecosystems. So the innovations that I’m most excited about in the near term are around how other units in our campus ecosystems—Student Success, Academic Advising, Admissions, HR, Continuing Education, Alumni Relations, and others—will have the chance to collaborate with us to leverage learning records to serve learners better and support them in realizing their successful futures.
Challenges and concerns are real. Leadership is a big one. I’m aware of few campuses where cabinet-level leaders and their direct reports have a sophisticated understanding of this landscape, and that’s a barrier to effective and adequate strategy, resource allocation, procurement, communications, and even goal setting.
The most repeated pressing concerns we see on the show are around model standards, frameworks, taxonomies, and structures. AACRAO members are uniquely qualified to lead our institutions’ efforts with credential innovation, and we also know from experience that so-called “Wild West” approaches don’t scale well. People want to know what others are doing and what works well because, in the absence of clearly defined “right ways” of implementing, there’s a lot of pressure to try and figure out which practices are going to lead to making decisions that stay made.
Your podcast builds a bridge between higher education practitioners and technology entrepreneurs. Do you agree or disagree? Are there other cross-sector discussions shaping your ideas of where credential innovation is headed, and if so, what insights have surprised you the most?
Geisel: I think it reflects that much of the expertise and thought leadership still resides with people working in vendor or professional associations. That makes sense since many people have jobs that don’t require them to have that expertise and certainly don’t afford them the time and support to become experts. On one hand, these folks have something to sell us, and we are wise to be mindful of that. It’s also important to be aware that they’re offering vital support for our own learning because they’re trying to sell us needed products and services that our institutions might not yet realize that we need nor why we need them.
The cross-section discussions I’m most inspired by are the early leaders who are thinking about high-impact implications that aren’t limited to their own scope of work and have them reaching out to others’ lanes. These are people who may work in the Office of the Registrar yet are making a team sport out of the effort and talking about game-changing approaches at scale, such as collaborations that help support student success efforts or that empower campus HR to be a leader in demonstrating that we as employers value credentials in our own hiring practices.
The most surprising insight for me is that despite throughlines with clear implications to Admissions and CRM efforts, two existing priorities at most institutions, those topics don’t overlap with credential innovation. Those conversations will inevitably integrate with what we discuss on “Credential Chats,” so I’m surprised it isn’t already happening and also sad that we’re delaying the progress we could be making.
How has your perspective on what constitutes valuable credentials changed since starting this podcast, and what conversations do you hope to spark in the upcoming season?
Geisel: Great question! We can get caught up in quality and value and easily overlook that a really important consequence of deciding what counts is that we also decide what does not. There is so much at risk with that! My perspective has completely changed on this because guests helped me realize that my own role in the Office of the Registrar helps me support quality and value through things like consistent frameworks, transparent governance, and valid data so that our institutions’ digital badges, for example, should be trusted, are verifiable, and worthy of our brand. This offers me tools to support quality and value more objectively regarding formal university recognition of learning and achievement that is meaningful and matters to our constituents. It helps me to avoid making judgments that could otherwise limit access to recognition.
What led you down this path to AACRAO?
Geisel: My first career was as a high school Spanish teacher, and an early mentor told me, “Professionals join their professional associations.” This advice turned into a core value for me. When I was hired as the Micro-credentials Program Manager at CU Boulder, an added benefit was working for Kristi Wold-McCormick, so I quickly discovered that AACRAO represents us.
I remember when I found out what a registrar does. You know, the totality of my understanding before that time was that's the office I pay $30 to for an official copy of something I already spent tens of thousands for. It didn't even occur to me that there was a person who was a registrar—I just thought that's what the space on campus was called. I got hired and won the boss lottery with Kristi. I started volunteering and getting involved with AACRAO.
And because my start also aligned with AACRAO efforts to publish a white paper for members and launch learning and communications efforts to socialize credential innovation, volunteer and “voluntold” opportunities found me right away. Luckily, I already believe in the importance of saying “Yes!” to such opportunities, so I was ready and willing to find myself so involved.
As to how “Credential Chats” came to exist, I’m pretty sure that someone from AACRAO floated the idea and that I immediately responded with something along the lines of, “When do we start?”
Who are your role models? Who inspires you?
Geisel: I am fortunate to have many mentors and role models who inspire me, including my boss, Kristi. Specific to the world of AACRAO, I binged the “For the Record” podcast and learned from Doug McKenna and his guests what registrars do and that we can be passionate about doing it. I’m grateful to each of them and to all of the guests on “Credential Chats” who have taught me so much. I’m also inspired by Melanie Gottlieb, Mark McConahay, and Mike Simmons and their influence on AACRAO’s outsized leadership in this space. It’s a masterclass I’m lucky to watch.
I’m doing the work I’m doing because I truly believe it is going to change the world and help people live better lives. There’s so much I don’t know, and the AACRAO community is filled with role models who help me learn and grow each day, which I think helps us move closer to making the change we want to see in the world a reality.
How did you become so interested in this world of this world digital credentials?
Geisel: I was working in Denver in a school district that was getting lots of attention for innovation. An unwritten rule of every meeting was to show Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk, which was great. But right after seeing him talk about the future's creativity, empathy, critical thinking, and awareness, we were also talking about evaluating students and teachers and schools based on knowledge of level multiple choice test scores that, like, in the real world, you would just Google the answer to. There was just a fundamental disconnect for me that was frustrating.
I was teaching high school Spanish, and part of my raise was based on how students were doing in math and science and writing scores that I didn't even touch. I didn't see I was preparing learners for success in the future. I don't know if you've ever seen ClassDojo, but I started “hacking” ClassDojo to make it a badging platform.
I was following the right people on Twitter in the UK who were inventing badging. I followed those accounts, including the early digital media learning (DML) stuff, the MIT Media Lab, and programs funded by Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation.
I was just convinced of the future of how we meaningfully and reliably validate stuff that actually matters so we can match people and opportunities. And so I bet my career on it—what I didn't realize then that I was doing, so I just stuck with it. I started a conference called The Badge Summit. This will be the 10th year. Because there weren't spaces back then, like there were a lot of white papers, but for people in “Executionland,” like practitioners, there wasn't a space to share their work.
We had a weekly Twitter chat, like #BadgeChat (X login required), where people shared, “This is what we're doing,” and engaged with weird questions. I started the conference because I never lost the belief that this is part of the future for answering big questions on hiring decisions. When a decision-maker has 10 seconds to look at something that a candidate might spend hours preparing for, how do we make good decisions and avoid bad ones—a bad hiring decision is really costly. And so, how do we do this in a way that is a win for the opportunity side but also for the person trying to access the opportunities?
We're now reaching a moment where my mom can sort of understand what I do for a living. Haha, but for many years, I would have to explain to people—now, even if people don't fully understand, they've heard of it. I think most people in North America have fewer than two degrees of separation from somebody who has earned or issued a digital credential.
The theory of change is that time is the villain, and people are already overcommitted. How might we meet the needs of people who want to learn but don't have time? We have a really bite-sized thing that is totally comprehensible and not too fast or too deep, just touch points to help practitioners start to wrap their heads around this and feel safe and know that they're not as far behind as they think they are, and gain clarity and confidence about the role of the AACRAO professions being leaders in this space and that that's really vital. At the end of the day, the credentialing space is all about recognition.