The Digital Age Demands a New Transcript

How hs.credit is Revolutionizing Education

An ntNFT Wallet Serves as Digital Era H.S. Transcript

The hs.credit app reinvents the high school transcript, updating accountability metrics for the Digital Age. Our goal is to establish a source of high quality educational data; data which is a strong predictor of outcomes in a digital economy; data which is based on project-based student work products uploaded once per month during the 11th and 12th grades.

The hs.credit App

Industrial era high schools have become so out of touch with our digital reality that they are forced to use compliance (coercion) to keep our teenagers in the school building and out of harm’s way. They function as human warehouses, not institutions of learning. “Sit down, keep quiet, follow directions” are the skills that predict success and “will this be on the test?” is the driving question for students, teachers, and administrators alike as they are each evaluated on that question.

The result is that a young person’s natural interest in the world around them, the dopamine that rushes into their brain every time they learn a new skill, is put to sleep. Many of our schools are literally stunting our kids’ growth, killing their chances of success in a global marketplace, while simultaneously eroding our democracy. Sadly, students who fall in line and become testing superstars emerge prepared for industrial (factory/cubicle) jobs that are no longer available because of the prevalence artificial intelligence, robotics, and the gig economy favoring contract work over secure 9–5 jobs.

From Eduoptia.org | Topics | Project Based Learning

The good news is that solving this problem does not require a new form of education. Project-based learning has been around for over one hundred years and was formative in the education of those who are successful today such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Beyoncé, Sean Combs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jimmy Wales, Bill Gates, among many others. Recently, research has confirmed the power of project-based learning which does not cost more money or require any significant change to our existing public schools.

By introducing gold standard, project-based credits, schools and families can finally opt out of high stakes testing. In recent years many school communities and individual families have opted out of standardized testing in elementary and middle school. Until now doing so in high school was tantamount to not graduating or not going to college.

From Edutopia.org | Topics | Project Based Learning

Instead of students taking one AP History exam to represent all they learned over twelve years of social studies, students using hs.credit can upload one video or podcast each month (October to May) during 11th and 12th grades to earn an equivalent credential. That provides sixteen times more data than the standardized exam, with anyone able to scan a QR code on the printed transcript to access to the digital file that was submitted for each of the sixteen possible credits.

By introducing strong incentives toward project-based learning, educators can finally engage in the kind of learning that they have always known to be best for their students. Project-based learning gives control of the questions that drive instruction to the students, while giving control of accountability data to educators rather than politicians. While educators continue to define the skills required for a high school credit, students practice those skills (research, writing, problem solving, …) by answering questions that they themselves craft. It is important to add that recent calls for social/emotional learning and culturally relevant curricula are doomed to failure without a shift away from top-down, standardized, compliance-focused evaluation metrics.

With Industrial Learning, Spending Skyrockets While Results Do Not Improve Source: Cato Institute, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress

On the hs.credit app, a committee of three educators, known as “credit experts” earn $180/hr to evaluate 10-minute segments of youth media (that’s $180/hr!). Students, in turn, gain access to gold standard high school credits no matter what school they attend, and the top performers have the opportunity to earn a 25-year basic income award for their leadership in reducing inequities within their school district. Organizations like The College Board and others who depend on standardized testing are incentivized to offer project-based alternatives simply by licensing their stamp of approval to those credits that meet their criteria for academic acumen. Teacher unions and school districts save money, satisfy the demands of students and parents, and benefit from a massive talent of educators in their ranks, should they choose to endorse the move away from high stakes industrial testing.

The key to the hs.credit platform is the ntNFT, a non-transferable, non-fungible cryptographic token. This is a dumbed down version of the NFT used by artists to sell digital art. The only difference is that the producer of these academic tokens cannot sell them or otherwise transfer them to anyone else (hence, “non-transferable” prefix). The upgraded high school transcript is thus little more than wallet of these tokens.

This cryptographic proof of academic work reduces cheating, too. Normally we only focus on students or families cheating, but in the case of the ntNFT, cheating becomes nearly impossible for bad apple administrators and politicians, too, since they do not have control over the evaluation of student work products nor the resulting transcript. For students, it is much harder to cheat when producing a complex media segment which requires three cycles of revision, multiple meetings and working sessions with peers and an online audio/video editing coach. Compare trying to cheat on all these interactions over the course of sixteen cycles of media production to trying to get the answer key or find someone to sit for a single exam on one Saturday afternoon.

In an economy that is driven by the sale of human attention, teaching our young people to master their own attention toward the production of quality youth media segments becomes an important economic indicator, as important to digital economics as GDP was to the global growth of the industrial corporation.