Kiko Suarez on Comprehensive Learner Records

Hey listeners, before we get to the conversation, I just wanted to tell you a bit about the services and solutions that Getting Smart offers. Did you know that we collaborate with and advocate for impact-oriented partners who are committed to accelerating the future of teaching, leading, and learning? Our strategic solutions are tailored to best support each partner in achieving their goals

and helping leaders know what to do next. Working with our vast network of resources and partners, we design and form strategic solutions that last. Whether your organization needs support with learning design and coaching, strategy, professional learning, media, communication and marketing, or are looking to build your next campaign,

we are here to help. If you’re interested in learning more about our services and working with our team, email Jessica at GettingSmart.com or visit GettingSmart.com slash whatwedo. Kiko, why do learners need a comprehensive learner record? Because a transcript doesn’t say what they learn are able to do.

They need to be able to tell the world, this is what I know and I’m able to do, and a transcript doesn’t do it. Love that. It’s really about helping them tell their story, right? That’s exactly right.

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Vanderrack. I’m joined today by Kiko Suarez. He’s a VP of higher education and workforce development at Territorium, a global ed tech company connecting learners with recommended jobs.

Territorium has launched an AI-powered comprehensive learner record. You’ll find out today what that is and why it’s a big deal. Kiko, great to see you again. Yeah, great to recognize Tom. I know that our paths will always cross somewhere in the universe.

I’m thinking, I know we were together five years ago, I think when we were at Lumina, we’ve both been in a college access space for a very long time. I would love to have you just reflect on what the heck is happening in higher ed today. Higher ed was in crisis before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened. What’s your take on what’s happening in higher ed today?

Listen, I’m going to tell you a story. When I did my PhD, the chair of my dissertation, Al Gaskin, who is someone I love, always said to me, higher education loves innovation. I mean, we love it. You can have revolutionary ideas, but you have to have an evolutionary process.

And that’s the heck out of me because an evolutionary process may sound like millions of years. But anyway, that’s part of what’s happening. I think that sometimes these systems are so entrenched and they are designed for a different time and it’s very difficult to move the machine. So unfortunately, if you put that on top of all the other waves of bad news and shutdowns

and viruses and everything, it’s extremely distracting and at the same time, very difficult to make any decent moves towards a better place. In the old days, I don’t know if this was true, but we thought of a degree as equaling readiness for a job. And that was sort of the bargain of the American dream.

I’d go to college, when you get that degree, you’ll get a job and you’ll have a better life than your parents. And that escalator is broken today that college degree doesn’t always equal a job and it doesn’t do a great job of signaling readiness anymore, does it? That is correct.

And I know that that has been a conversation for many, many years. My hope is that we can actually start enabling that more now. Technology allows you to go granular on certain things. So we can actually start capturing what students know and are able to do at a more granular level.

The course concept is great and the grades are great. And I love the transcripts, but they only serve a purpose and they do not serve the purpose of providing a bridge to the labor market. The interesting thing that’s happened in both high school and colleges, they’ve just, they become very unbundled.

Learners aren’t relying just on something their teacher assigned them. They’re going out and finding open resources and where and how they can. They’re going to go out and take a class at an online charter school or if they’re in college, they may go get a class on Coursera. So learners are really sort of leaning into the anywhere anytime learning and just our

old transcripting systems and guidance systems haven’t yet figured out how to rebundle learning in a meaningful way, right? That is correct. And that’s why, you know, these type of technologies would allow to create an ecosystem of learning where students can actually access those other sources and even with, if you want, quote,

unquote permission from faculty, because, you know, at the end of the day, colleges and universities and even high schools, they need to realize that they are not the sole providers of learning. So the more they understand that, the more they will let their students go off the walls, grab that learning, make sure that it’s properly assessed and incorporate that into their journey.

What is Territorium? What’s the backstory? So it’s a fascinating story. Even though I’m not from Mexico, I’m from Spain. So I have to say that upfront because I may sound a little bit like it, but now.

But it was founded by a couple of young men 10 years ago from Monterrey, Mexico. They were attending school at Monterrey Tech, which for some listeners, you may think of like a Georgia Tech, something like that in Mexico. And they started a company and they were about to drop out of college because they were, it was either the company or the degree.

And they always make the yoga. Yerma, the founder always makes the yoga. He went back home and told the mom, and you don’t tell a Mexican mom, you’re dropping out of college like that. It’s like you are not allowed to even wear your family name ever again in history.

So he went back to the president of Monterrey Tech and said, hey, you know, I’m about to drop out. What’s going on? And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, don’t, because the institution is changing. We want to promote entrepreneurship and we want to make sure that people can actually

learn doing things that are practical. So why don’t you and your colleague start a process and we’ll provide you the professors to actually start understanding what it is that you’re learning and capturing all that. They always make the joke now that they had consultants for free for several months because all these professors were helping them actually start the company.

But that’s how it all started. And to be honest, Territorium started this process that way in a kind of a very natural, organic way, while at the same time, if you remember back in like 2013, I was talking about digital learning passports and all the registrar started to talk about these things. It became a movement.

So now you put it all together in 2021 and there is technology like the one that Territorium developed. And then there’s this movement of people understanding that that’s what students want. So that’s the idea. And Territorium now has 9 million users worldwide, which is kind of very impressive.

And what markets does that include? Is it big in Latin America? Really it was the expansion was in Latin America and Central America. We started one of the reasons why I joined the company is to help the company grow in the US.

And so we have a few projects here. We have Morgan State. So we have an HBCU. We have University of Maryland. We are working with some community colleges as well.

And there are accelerated conversations in many places because that’s what universities really need to do. We have a few projects in South Africa and also some in China. What about high school? Either here in the United States or elsewhere, any high schools getting out of school?

Absolutely. So it’s a great question because a lot of people don’t imagine that this idea can actually impact the K-12 journey and it impacts basically fundamentally. So yes, we do. In Mexico, like every country is different.

The systems are integrated or disintegrated or fragmented, but the concept is the same. So anybody that is thinking competency-based education at K-12 level, this would allow them to capture all that. Pico, let me just drill down on this and sort of make the case for comprehensive learner records or learner and employment records.

The idea of having a lifetime learning passport is such a big idea. As we were describing in both high school and college, students are out getting valuable work experiences. They’re sometimes taking a class where they get a certified skill. Maybe they come from IBM or Salesforce or Google.

They have an experience that could be credentialed. All of these things don’t show up on a traditional transcript, which is just a list of courses and grades. So I think the idea behind the Territorium is to capture the full evidence of a learner’s journey and help them describe who they are and where they’re headed.

That is correct. And to that extent, one of the things that we decided to do is not reinvent the wheel. So when you have a platform like this, you land in an institution, they already have an LMS, they might be capturing certain of these learning experiences somewhere. So we basically decided to create a platform that plugs in to anything you have.

And then it allows you to create this fluency of competencies and skills back to the students because that is key. I was recently doing some career coaching before I joined Territorium and man, wasn’t my surprise how little students, undergrads and grads, know about what they know. I had this young man that was coming out of a really great school here in the U.S.

And the dad calls me because he knows me from back in the day, who is working for DuPont and says, can you help my son? And I say, absolutely. So I talked to the kid, hey Alejandro, what’s going on? Can’t find a job.

What do you mean you can’t find a job? He graduated with honors from a really good technology school in the U.S. And I said, okay, well send me your resume. Well, you know, even career services people, I know they do their best they can, but man, that resume sucked.

Education at the top. No, education goes at the bottom, my friend. Skills and competencies go at the top. What do you know where you’re able to do? I don’t know.

What do you mean you don’t know? You spent four years in college, but they don’t know. So the real value in my opinion, apart from living with a portable wallet that is machine readable and human readable in the blockchain and all this good technology jargon, is that students will be able to see what they are learning from a competencies and skills perspective

and have a conversation with the institution about it. And I think that is golden. If only if this young man had that, he would know what jobs to apply. Even though now technology, like in this platform that we’re talking about, we have customized job boards per student.

So instead of showing you a thousand jobs that might be a match and then you do the narrowing of the search, we show you five. The five that are a closer link to the skills and competencies you’re developing. And so, you know, it was about time when technology that can do a lot of things could be put to work towards this idea of competencies and skills.

Kiko, you guys advertise this as being AI-powered. And I’m not sure where and how would machine learning come into the mix here? Yep. So our platform has two artificial intelligence engines that apply machine learning on two sides.

One side is the institution. Every repository that they may have, whether it’s an LMS or multiple LMSs, as I told you, any data, marks they have, whatever they have, where they capture learning, where they capture learning experiences, learning achievements, learning rubrics. We are constantly learning about what is it that the institution has.

The other area where we have an AI engine is on the job market side. So we sit down with the institution, say, we can crawl any job board today, like in real time. Tell us which ones are the ones you want us to crawl. We can crawl your own. Sometimes institutions have their own LinkedIn.

Indeed. If you have burning glass, we’ll connect to your data set, whatever it is that you have in terms of labor market information. And so that one is learning how job postings look like. And we’d crosswalk that information using affinity algorithms with the competencies and

skills that the institution are providing through their learning outcomes and their learning experiences. So that way the student will be able to see how they fare compared to what the real job is asking for. Over the last 20 years, there’s been sort of off and on discussions of portfolios and

collections of learner curated artifacts of the work that they can do. Do this territory include a portfolio or do you link to a portfolio? How do you recommend that learners sort of capture real artifacts? Right. So I would say this is an evolution of that concept mixed with an official record of the

institution. In other words, it contains evidence, but it’s only the evidence that you use to prove that you master the competency. You cannot alter that. So if I have a course that asks me to show my presentation skills and I do send a video

to my faculty and the faculty say, yeah, you actually connect with this learning outcome related to presentation skills, that will count as evidence and will be put in a permanent record in the blockchain in your wallet in a secure way. The student has agency with the wallet. You can actually show which skills you want to show the employers or not, but you cannot

tamper with the evidence of what got you to master that skill. That’s a big difference. Well, let me build on that. Just a little bit. Kiko, so a learner, you can’t tamper with the evidence.

That’s key because then it’s trustworthy around a particular skill assertion, but you could curate the part of your profile that you permission to a group of universities or to tech employers, right? That is correct. That is correct.

So that’s the level of agency that a digital wallet allows the student to have. And, you know, the other thing that we should say about digital wallets at the time, I would call it learning passport, but whatever is because we have learning experiences that go beyond our time in college. Thank goodness.

We can actually accumulate in our digital wallet any learning experience post college. So one of the things that we are working on now is we are creating machine readable API or application, you know, programming interfaces for the employer side, the talents management side. So say I apply to a job, the job posting is the first interaction I have.

And then I have all my interviews, but I get the job. Well, my wallet can go to the employer and the record that all the information about my skills and competencies can be imported directly into the talent management system, you know, my work today or Oracle or whatever it is that the employer uses. And that would allow, I think, us whenever we get jobs and move because I moved jobs too, and I

learned things and different jobs that could be part of my digital wallet. You know, I had conversations Tom with, I remember back in the day when I was talking about this in theory, right, with AARP and how people are reinventing themselves for a third career. I mean, we’re living longer now and we have to reinvent ourselves. And the resume is not, it’s outdated and we don’t have all these skills and competencies that are

more recent. And so I think this is going to be the way to reduce friction between what you learn or kind of the institutions of learning and then the world of the labor market. Kiko, we’re super excited about Comfort of Learner Records and just see so much benefit for both learners and learning institutions, but as well as as employers.

But they’ve been slow to take off. I think in part because it’s just challenging to build a two-sided market to get learning institutions to adopt and use Learner Records and then treat helping employers begin to make use of them. So isn’t this a classic kind of two-sided market that you have to sell out to both users, the sender and the receiver? It’s a great question.

And obviously you’ve been around for a while on this. So it’s never that easy. It requires a lot of teamwork. But what I learned, at least in the recent months after joining Territorium, is that there is more willingness on both sides that they used to be when I was a few years ago talking about these things. In other words, there’s been enough progress in things like inner operability, interest.

The US Chamber of Commerce has projects on this. It’s the same, right? L-E-R-I-L-R-C-L-R, whatever you want to call it, is the same concept. So the fact that we move the needle and that both sides, the institutions and the employers are talking about the same stuff is very good news. But I’m not going to lie to you.

It’s always a challenge. Everybody lives in the wrong world. And our hope is that institutions start to see the CLR as the third leg of this tool. So in the past, they were focused on SISs, right? Student information system, that’s where you have your information of record.

That’s what goes to the Department of Ed. That is golden. Don’t touch it. Great. And your transcripts come out of that.

Then you have the LMS, the interactions between faculty and the students. Well, now you can have a CLR that it becomes the bridge between the institution and the student and the outside world, both to bring in stuff, but also obviously, as we were saying, to connect with the employers. And that, I think, is much better now than it used to be. Kiko, this is kind of a future of learning question. Particularly during the pandemic, we saw a big moment around skill space hiring.

That more and more employers are relying less on degrees and much more on skills, skill assertions and evidence behind those skill assertions. Do you think higher ed is going to move towards skills and away from courses? Or do you think for as far as we can see, it will end up being a combination of a list of courses that you took and skills that you’ve been certified in? Right. Well, you and I both know that the coin of the realm is a credit for a reason, right?

As being around for a while as the way universities get paid or at least their financial aid is attached to that or that. So I don’t see like an immediate, you know, removal of the credit, but I do see institutions taking into account comprehensive learner record information for things like prior learning assessment, even for admissions. And so I think that gradually we’re going to see more and more hybridized environments like that. But, you know, these things take forever and until the coin of the realm changes, I think that the credit will stay. But, you know, even when it comes down to the military records and things like that, there are so many things that could be done better than what we do today with PLA.

If you focus on companies and skills that I think there’s going to be a lot more interest in that regard when it comes down to transfers and admissions and things like that. And part of this hybrid solution that you described is we’re seeing more and more post secondary institutions getting really serious about what’s inside that course and making sure that they’re clear about here’s the skills that you’ll develop in this course. And here’s the evidence of the skills that you have developed. So even that container may still be a course and a credit inside that is much more clarity around the skills that you’re working on. That is exactly right.

You just hit the nail in the head. That is the granularity level that to be perfectly honest, it’s more value for the student. But institutions get a little scared because it’s more work. So one of the things that we did with this AI engines is to do some pre mapping. So we look at all the learning achievements that are in the LMS and then we look at all your learning rubrics and we do some pre mapping that a human needs to validate.

But at least you don’t have to start from scratch with an empty screen with learning outcomes on one side and then trying to figure out how to do the mapping. So hopefully institutions will take advantage of this progress that technology has made and started increasing the adoption rates of these comprehensive learning records. Kiko, would love to have you just reflect on the path forward for the territory. Maybe first we can just talk about the product and then we’ll talk about the marketplace. But any new features or initiatives that you want to highlight?

Yeah, one of the things that we’re working on more and more is on the employer side. So because we do know that our product is extremely efficient when it comes down to granular mapping of skills and companies as you just mentioned. But at the same time, we want to be able to provide employers access to the platform and access to the digital wallets. So we are creating all these APIs. Another thing that’s going to come down and is happening now as we speak with some of our corporate partners when we talk to employers is that we can help employers figure out their learning strategies the same way that we can help institutions figure out their learning rubrics.

And, you know, do better matches towards what the goals are. So I’ve seen some very interesting kind of skunkworks. If you want on the innovation side of the territory and where, you know, we’re having conversations that go deep onto the employer side more than just the job posting. And that is kind of a fascinating prospect. Kiko, while we were talking, I got another email from your team about the Young People’s Project, which is really cool.

They just announced today along with Math Door. It’s an effort to create a certification program in support of Title I high schools. It allows high school students to create interactive math games to teach algebra to their middle school peers. So that’s very cool and interesting. Yeah, there’s a lot of cool and interesting stuff going on in K through 12.

Man, did you get the wrong person for that because I’m only higher-reading workforce development. But I appreciate my colleagues on the K through 12 space. There’s so much, so much that can be said in terms of progress in that area. We’re super excited about your potential work in K-12 because we just have to better equip young people to tell their story. Let’s just talk about the marketplace.

I’m curious as you think about the growth in the United States in the next year or two. Is that going to be institution by institution or do you see states playing an active role in encouraging the adoption of a comprehensive learner record? Yeah, I think it’s going to be an interesting combination of that. But yes, I think states will begin to realize that that’s the case. I know several commissions of higher-ed that are working that have task forces with multiple institutions to basically collectively define what a comprehensive learning record would look like.

So I think it’s going to be an interesting combination of that. The other thing is, we didn’t talk too much today about any specific sector, but obviously community colleges being where they are and kind of that connection with the K through 12 space, dual enrollment, dual credit programs, things like that. It’s a natural for something like this. And so if you start thinking 9 through 12 and beyond, there is going to be a very natural connection and progression when it comes down to moving that record around.

Hey, we’ve been talking to Kiko Suarez from Territorium, a great comprehensive learner record company started in Mexico. It’s now expanding in the United States. Just a quick reflection from me. As you can tell, I’m super excited about digital learner records and the promise that that holds for both high school and college learners. It’s really equipping lifelong learning and helping learners tell their story, helping them curate a record and permission that out to potential employers, partners,

learning institutions. We think it’s a really critical part of the future. It’s an equity play to help everybody have access to learning and to work. Kiko, we appreciate your lifetime contribution in this in the access space and we’re excited that you’re with us. Cool new group, Territorium.

Thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Tom, and thank you for the good work that you’ve been doing relentlessly in a space that I’m not sure it appreciates relentless people, but hey, let’s do it. Check out Territorium.com to learn more. Any place else you want to send us, Kiko? Well, the only thing I would say is clr.teritorium.com because that’s where we have information about this particular platform.

Awesome. Check that out. Thanks to the Hope Getting Smart team for making this podcast possible, especially our creative director and FOIA Laureate Mason Pasha. And everybody out there, keep learning, keep leading, keep innovating for equity, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next in learning.

In order to stay on the cutting edge, we need people in the field to tell us what they’re hearing, what they’re wanting, and what they’re needing to learn more about. Got a topic or a guest in mind? Send your recommendations to me, Mason, at GettingSmart.com. And if you like what you’re hearing, don’t forget to leave a review in Apple Podcasts or subscribe wherever you listen. Feel free to share the podcast on social media using the hashtag GSPodcasts.

Thanks so much.