Authors & Gratitude
This paper was authored by Nate McClennen with contributions from the Getting Smart team and numerous friends and partners in the field. Much of the video content has been taken from our ongoing Getting Smart Town Halls, podcasts and more. It is also a part of our New Pathways campaign.
The production of this publication was made possible with generous support by Stand Together.
Vision
Every learner deserves an unlimited number of unbundled opportunities to explore, engage, and define experiences that advance their progress along a co-designed educational pathway. Each pathway provides equitable and personalized access to stacked learning experiences leading to post-secondary credentials and secure family-sustaining employment. Throughout the journey, supportive coaches focus on helping learners build skills to navigate with agency. In parallel, learners develop foundational skills (literacy, math), technical skills, and durable skills and connect these to challenging co-designed experiences. The breadth and depth of experiences increase over time, and, in partnership, learners and coaches map progress towards reaching community-defined goals. This vision is only enabled by an unbundled learning ecosystem.
Introduction
Press play for an audio overview of Unbundled Learning
Since the advent of formal education, learning has been bundled. Most students attend schools and follow a prescriptive curriculum determined by the school, state, or other governing body. The curriculum is bundled together via classes or courses, and once the student has completed each of these at a satisfactory level, the authorizing body grants a credential.
However, even within a constrained system such as this, unbundled opportunities exist at various levels of granularity. At the classroom level, except in the most prescriptive programs, educators draw on a variety of resources and develop learning experiences from different sources. In this way, the classroom experience is often unbundled.
At the course level, high school students often can choose courses that best serve their interests. Despite typically being within a constrained system (such as a comprehensive school), learners have choices to bundle different elements to meet their needs. The larger the school, the greater the variation of choices.
An unbundled system provides more personalized and relevant learning experiences for all students at the learning experience level. When the system can build structures that allow young people to meet competencies and standards in a variety of ways from a variety of sources at the learning experience level, conditions for success increase. In this publication, we articulate the critical steps needed to unbundle the learning ecosystem, build core competencies, design learning experiences, curate new opportunities, and rebundle these experiences into coherent pathways.
Elements
For an unbundled system to meet all of the core principles, core structural elements must exist. A fully decentralized education system entails a distributed set of learning experiences to which any education creator might contribute. LX designers (whether individuals or organizations) would build and launch options for learning any topic or any skill. Students would co-design the pathway that satisfies proficiency requirements (presumably set by local or state governments) built on an infinite number of choices.
Learning Experience Marketplace
Anyone can build content/share an LX in any form. These learning experiences must be easy to access and search. For the last thirty years, open educational resources (such as Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, Connexions, and NROC HippoCampus) have provided unbundled learning. Outschool provides an early example of this (albeit within a single modality of video mentorship and instruction) by offering up 10,000+ instructors to millions of learners worldwide. Teachers Pay Teachers is also an early learning marketplace that focuses on curricular lessons rather than instruction. Finally, there are a number of course/credential aggregators or universities such as Stepmojo, ASU Universal Learner Courses, and SNHU that provide virtual experiences—sometimes disaggregated from course-level constraints.
Mapped Pathways
While every student co-designs their experience in an unbundled ecosystem, a coherent set of pathways must exist alongside expected skills and knowledge outcomes from the experience. These outcomes must then map directly to regional, national, and global employer needs and/or future community needs. These pathways provide direction towards a clear target defined by core (foundational literacies), technical (industry specific), and transferable (higher-level and applicable to all sectors) skills.
Learner Records
Unbundled systems allow learners to store learning and employment credentials that are free to use (for life), and each user owns their personal data for life (self-sovereignty). GreenLight Credentials and LearnCard are among the many wallets that verify and store learning credentials.
Coaching and Guidance
For an unbundled ecosystem to function, expert coaches guide students to co-design pathways that meet future needs. Differentiated from current school counselors, these coaches are well-versed in the unbundled opportunities that exist for every learner. In addition to highly developed advisory and mentorship programs, Big Thought’s Opportunity Advisor and Friends of the Children professional mentors are designed to support students through their learning journey within the expanded ecosystem.