degreed

Become a Founding Scholar

It's been exactly 50 years since JFK gave his famous 'Go to the Moon' speech in response to the Soviet Union beating the US into space, the original 'Sputnik Moment'. He inspired a nation to go to the moon. Now is a time of unprecedented challenge and change in education. In fact, Obama has called education "our generation's sputnik moment".

Learning has never been more available and inexpensive, yet the cost of (formal) education continues to rise at 3x the rate of inflation. Universities do not have a monopoly on learning - only credentialing. Degreed will create the world's first Digital Lifelong Diploma, which will 'jailbreak' the degree and enable learners to reflect everything they've learned, from any source, throughout their lives.

Degreed is creating the world's first digital diploma, that scores and validates your lifelong education from any source, both formal (e.g. Harvard) and informal (e.g. Khan Academy, iTunesU, Coursera, conferences, certificates, assessments, and media). The digital diploma enables a best-of model of education. Fast Company writes, "Why can't we take robotics at Carnegie Mellon, linear algebra at MIT, law at Stanford? And why can't we put 130 of these together and make it a degree?" With the Digital Lifelong Diploma you can.

We have already made great progress on building the Digital Lifelong Diploma. So far, we've cataloged almost every college course in America, 4.5M courses. We've also cataloged hundreds of informal course providers, thousands of courses. We've designed and begun to develop the foundation for a truly amazing and personalized Digital Lifelong Degree. But we're just getting started and we need your help. We want to catalog and validate all educational inputs, that means courses, conferences, certificates, badges, media, articles.

Our Purpose: Jailbreaking the Degree

Currently, the degree is the only meaningful "unit" of education to which employers give any credence. Of this dependency, TIME magazine writes, "The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it … It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs."

The traditional degree, with its four-year time commitment and steep price tag, made sense when the university centrally aggregated top academic minds with residency-based students. Education required extensive logistics, demanding deep commitment from students worthy of being rewarded with the all-or-nothing degree.

But education isn't all-or-nothing. College and its primary credential, the degree, needn't be either. The benefit of modern, online education is that the burden of logistics and infrastructure are greatly reduced, allowing for the potential of a fluid, lifelong education model.

"I bet what happens as [higher education] becomes more modular is that [credentials] occurs at the level of the course, not the university; so they can then offer degrees as collection of the best courses taught in the world. A barrier that historically kept people out of university [is] blown away by the modularization and the change in [course-by-course] accreditation.". -- Clayton Christensen

Once courses are the "unit" of education it empowers us to take the best courses from around the world, from any course provider, offline or online, accredited or not. It empowers a model of education that continues our whole lives through—that isn't "done" after four years. The digital diploma does exactly that.

Help us Spread the Word

We appreciate your support. We hope that you'll share this campaign with your friends, family, grandma, everybody.

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Founding Donors

• David Hagan
• Jason Palmer
• Joseph Thibault
• Michelle Susan Loeffler
• Robert Hustwick
• Sathya Krishnan
• Frances Taylor
• Consuelo Pasca
• Rahul Sen
• Nathan Bouscal
• Peter Pinch
• Sarah Thomas
• Mark Newman
• Paul Conley
• Mustafa Gultepe
• Gabriel Van Duinen
• Dominik Lukes
• Stanley Walker
• Paul Johnson
• Mazzy Consulting
• Kevin Bell
• Jay Cross
• Cross Limit LLC
• Sean Brady
• Chris Kenst
• Chulho Hyun
• Wordwhipper
• Thomas Kilgore
• Michael Stout
• Chris Eyre
• Deborah Williams
• Michael Levinthal
• Joseph Cardin
• Deborah Williams