A major new investment in an open platform learning tracker aims to drive further adoption of the service, validate informal learning.
Could an informal job skills tracking platform signal a major shift in standards of learning and skill measurement worldwide?
Degreed, an education company focused on helping users track, measure and validate everything they learn, announced a $7 million Series A investment at Monday’s ASU+GSV Summit.
“Two of the themes at the ASU+GSV Summit are ‘Open Platforms’ and ‘Knowledge as Currency,’” said Deborah Quazzo, founder and managing partner at GSV Advisors. “Degreed is leading along both frontiers by redefining how we measure and recognize learning and skills, no matter where or how they were obtained.”
Essentially, Degreed enables users to track their academic, professional, and informal learning experiences in a single place, and includes libraries of curated learning content from thousands of different platforms and partners.
Informal learning experiences include everything a person learns that was not required by a university or employer, such as articles and videos seen online (which can be tracked with Degreed’s browser extension or by pasting a link), as well as books read or events attended (which can be logged when completed or synced with services like Pocket or Goodreads).
By describing the platform as open, “we mean you can learn from any university, provider, source, platform and in any modality and have it tracked on Degreed,” said David Blake, co-founder & CEO of Degreed. “Other credentials and micro-credentials require you complete their proprietary courses or training or assessments. At Degreed, we don’t care how or from whom you obtained the skills and learning, you can have it recognized on Degreed.
Blake continued, saying that if you ask someone about their education, he or she will “tell you where they went to college or what degree they have. People skip everything they have learned since. We learn within academia for two, four, six, nine years. We learn within our professions for thirty, forty, fifty years. Degreed enables individuals to capture all of that learning. With this investment, we continue to expand our enterprise platform to help companies enable their employees to leverage all learning–formal and informal–and have their skills recognized no matter how they obtained them.”
(Next page: What this investment could mean for standards of learning)
The company, which launched just over two years ago directly to consumers, has since amassed hundreds of thousands of users who use the platform to track their lifelong learning. In 2014, the company launched its enterprise product, which already serves companies with as many as 300,000+ employees to smaller businesses with 50 employees.
Signal Peak Ventures led the round with Peak Ventures, Deborah Quazzo of GSV Advisors, and a host of other participating internal investors. Primarily, the funding will be used to drive product development and demand generation as the company seeks to expand its offering of learning solutions for individuals as well as the enterprise marketplace–which could be a boon for informal learning advocates.
“Degreed’s expansion into the enterprise is extremely important in removing the stigma of learning as a strict function of academia,” said Brandon Tidwell, managing director of Signal Peak Ventures. “Degreed offers a powerful, measurable learning portal for any organization that wants to recognize and reward their employees for a life of continued learning. We’re thrilled to partner with Degreed as we truly believe they are creating what will become the standard of learning and skill measurement worldwide.”
Prior to this financing, Degreed raised a $1.8 million seed round from angel investors including Mark Cuban, Deborah Quazzo, and Mike Levinthal. The company was also named a “Top 5 Cool Education Company” by Gartner in 2014.
Though Blake says that the company has no plans to become a Prior Learning Assessment platform for higher education institutions at this time, Degreed seeks to leave a large impact on the learning ecosystem regardless.
“Right now, you ask anyone, “Tell me about your education,” and they tell you their degree,” Blake reiterated. “In the future, we believe that answer to that question will be what skills they have verified on Degreed.”
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