five company merger illuminate education

#Five company merger illuminate education professional
#Five company merger illuminate education series

Your question is at the market-level though, which is a super interesting way to think about impact. We also help them generate new auxiliary revenue funds as well as provide a better student experience. For any one school or university, we add a lot of value as we help them save money by going digital, automating, streamlining, etc. We believe that Parchment’s success brings sector-level opportunities that would not be available if a platform like Parchment never existed. How will the market be changed by your company’s success? These two ideas – credential innovation and learner credential management – ultimately brought me to Parchment. There should be a learner account – what we now call the Parchment Credential Profile – that an individual controls and that they can use to link to different education and training providers, but again, stays with them.

Each learning context treated the consumer as a “new account.” Learning is cumulative, and a learner’s learning record from one context can help inform access to or success with learning in the next.

#Five company merger illuminate education professional

Second, people would experience Blackboard in K12, again in higher education, and then again in their professional lives, but there was no “persistence layer” that they controlled and took with them. While my “meta” learning objectives were to help students write well, speak well, think analytically, and be comfortable with numbers, there was no way to represent those evergreen competencies, nor was there a way to represent a student’s proficiency in Stata, R, or survey design as an outgrowth of my courses. This observation returned to me when I was an assistant professor of sociology at Arizona State University. Credentials are the currency by which we convert our education into opportunities such as admissions or employment, but we were leaving the credential as a low-fidelity record despite the high-fidelity systems that supported the learning process.

In the process of helping to build Blackboard, two observations struck me:įirst, for all the innovation that education and training providers were embracing in terms of delivery of instruction, the credential that a learner earned at the end of a degree or non-degree program was basically the same as it always was – a paper-based transcript, diploma, or certificate. At Blackboard we were helping schools, universities, and professional organizations bring their education online. What is your company’s origin story?įor me, Parchment originates with my experience at Blackboard. Matt is also the co-founder of Blackboard, the ubiquitous higher education technology company. Parchment was acquired by Brentwood Associates in 2020 in conjunction with Parchment’s merger with competitor Credential Solutions. Parchment has helped millions of learners, over 13,000 school districts, university registrar offices, state education agencies, and other receivers (including university admissions offices, background check companies, employers, college application services, OPMs, and certification and licensing boards) to exchange more than 140 million transcripts, diplomas, certificates, comprehensive learner records (CLRs) and other credentials globally. The platform is two-sided, providing services to the organizations that receive, verify, and evaluate credentials as well the organizations that issue them. Since the initial investment, Matt and his team have built Parchment into a global platform that enables credentialing organizations to issue digital credentials that provide rich data about learning outcomes and experiences in a way that provides the learner with much more agency over their credentials than the old, fragmented, paper-based approach. Today, the company celebrates as many as six co-founders of companies that have been merged with Parchment since then. Matthew came to Parchment in 2011 through an investment in a predecessor company called Docufide that was founded in 2003. Matt saw the need for innovation in the provision and sharing of credentials as well as the need for learners to have more control over their credentials. Matthew Pittinsky invested in Parchment in 2011 to solve problems he first experienced as a co-founder of Blackboard.

#Five company merger illuminate education series

Founder’s Five is a continuing series from Tyton Partners that invites education company founders to shed light on their own success and illuminate the landscape for other education entrepreneurs and investors by answering five basic questions.