Pages

▼

Friday, June 10, 2016

Degreed: An initial play via Michelle (Ockers)’s suggestion

I first stumbled over Michelle on 21 May this year via this tweet about a MOOC we are both doing (Harvard’s Leaders of Learning):

Very shortly after that I got this tweet from Michelle while she was at ATD2016 and this learning journey began.

“Degreed exists to discover, empower, and recognize the next generation of the world's expertise. The smartest, brightest, and most bold, the tenacious, willing, the unsung heroes, self-taught, the scrappy, driven, the passionate, daring, the unafraid. Experts.”

(from the Degreed web site).

I have played with the site now for around a week and a half and have got hooked already.

See the Pathways page from my Degreed profile.

I then got Michelle-ed (a good thing! I am already grateful!) with the following tweet:

So as prep for that call, I pulled together the following screenshots and commentary as follows (numbers are picture sequence numbers but not marked on the pictures for time reasons!).

  1. Starting with the left hand menu – Today – shows Today’s Learning from Degreed (curated by them based on your input data). There is also a Saved For Later for content that you have marked as such.  Profile – a summary page of things you have completed e.g. degrees. I have an issue currently where my Stirling degree is appearing twice (Degreed are aware and trying to sort!). Not sure what the sort sequence is but degrees are appearing at the top.
  2. Profile / Collection – a list view with details of things you have completed. Note the Types column with record counts that you can use to browse.
  3. Profile / Pathways – probably my fave part of the site. You create subjects and then add content to the pathway. I am currently using these for content I am aware of to share with others by theme. This could be used to plan your learning more formally. I did not intend to do this from the start but  I naturally fell into this by defining these as roles (see Stephen Covey’s use of roles). If you hover over the square, description is shown if entered.
  4. Profile / Insights – graphical representation of your learning to date over time. Not a page I have actively engaged with to date.
  5. (page down of 4)
  6. (page down of 4)
  7. Click the red plus top right of screen to get the menu options to add Content and Achievements. There are also links for Extensions and Integrations – more on them in a moment. Select Degree to get to …
  8. Degree input screen, select Degree Level to see …
  9. Degree levels
  10. Learn (final left had menu option) – Degreed’s view of content they have relating to your content
  11. (page down of 10)
  12. Select your name top right to get drop down menu, select Settings to get …
  13. Personal options – including visibility (all my content is visible, I am an open book per ”working out loud”
  14. Email options – for summary of activity against those headings.
  15. Social options – your various social sites.
  16. Integrations options – to set up links to your learning accounts. FutureLearn conspicuous by its absence.
  17. Degreed button – Chrome extension is a must have as we shall see in a moment for speedy content adding. Plus a Browser Bookmarklet to bookmark a Degreed page.
  18. So with theh Chrome extension installed, go to a page on the Internet that you want to add to your Degreed account. Click Add to Pathway to get …
  19. We will assume this page is for a new Pathway, scroll down to end of Pathways list and select Add a new Pathway to get …
  20. Add a Title for the Pathway and add a tag.
  21. Go back to the Pathway and select the one you have just added.
  22. Select Section 1 and Lesson 1. I have not structured any of my pathways but this would be a good way to have mutliple sections and lessons to structure a pathway.
  23. And get a saved pathway message. Click that link to get ….
  24. The Pathway Authoring page. Pathways default to Private so select the down arrow to get …
  25. The pulldown and select Public to then get …
  26. The Pathway changed to visible.
  27. This page is to show you the Enrol option near the Pathway title. As far as I can tell this is just a flag to mark that you have started that pathway.
  28. Start to add a podcast episode. Not sure what happens if podcast is not on the system. In my case it was and you get prompted ….
  29. to select an episode, and when you do …
  30. it shows you the detail …
  31. (page down of 30)
  32. forces you to add a category (lots in the system but you can add your own.
  33. Next want to show you how to add content using the “Bin” (sic!) Drag the “Hygge” entry by the 8-dots to the place where you want it going.
  34. Now to show you clone-ing content in a pathway, select the clone icon to get to ….
  35. the pathway summary page showing you the pathway has been clone-ed.
  36. There then follow a number of pages to Add specific Content Types.

I hope this has provided some useful insights into the Degreed product. I have not explored all areas. I am not a Learning and Development professional but I can see me continuing to use this. I can see me using it to curate content by theme. I can also see me having to get cleverer with pathways as content mounts up.

I have already started tweeting using this sort of format:-

… and even sending a pathway link on its own.

This would be especially useful for those times when someone asks on Twitter for info and I have pre-canned content that historically I have sent to someone in multiple tweets. This may catch on!

 

Wondering what Michelle will make of all this ….

Grateful to have  stumbled over Michelle on Twitter.

 

Post-script: Michelle and I did a Google Hangouts on Air earlier today where we went through the above. That was a novelty – using that product  - for both of us! Unfortunately, the video recording consisted almost entirely of Michelle looking intently at the screen shots I was walking through via screen share which was not the intention at all! Lessons learned – but I do not know how to do that properly … yet. Good to hear Michelle’s questions and assessment on the way through from her organisational learning and development perspective as well as her personal learner perspective. Glad we did this.

 

Update: 14 June 2016 12:25

Points made by Michelle during the call included:-

  1. the lack of community building functionality in the product
  2. mentioning the Diigo product that she currently uses as her main curation tool as a good product to use
  3. mention of Open Badges and Mozilla Backpack and commenting that there is no indication that these are in/supported by Degreed
  4. not easy to see how many users there are using Degreed and how you connect with other users apart from a screen where a few “Suggested Users to Follow are listed”.

Since the call and hot off the press, I have just seen that Degreed have released a product update which includes a top menu with Home, Browse and Profile options. Browse now gives you the ability to see a few more users.

at

1 comment:

  1. HeyTodd4:13 pm

    Thanks for the review / feedback, Simon (and Michelle). Our product team is taking all this in! The community building features are available in the business-class version of the product. And in the new release, topical searches should now return people who have added content to their profiles with those tags. We're working on the rest...

    ReplyDelete