Equitable Pathways: Middle Skill Careers

The COVID crisis forced traditionally hands-on Career Technical Education (CTE) programs online overnight. Core-LX enabled that pivot with a hybrid learning environment for at-home CTE students with instant plug-and-play CTE programming. 

Longer term, the personalized competency-based approach prepares traditionally underserved students for lifelong CTE career success, developing the skills and dispositions necessary for mastering jobs that don’t yet exist.  Core-LX enables a new ecosystem of industry and educators united to align CTE programming to the needs of the local economies, creating a pipeline of qualified candidates for high-paying local jobs. 

CTE directors currently cope with a fragmented resource market that requires (often) proprietary licenses for each pathway, unique licensing, training, integration and support. The content is of variable quality.  Core-LX offers all pathways under one license, training process, and integration, with standards-compliant and interoperable data including IMS Comprehensive Learner Records for all student CTE competencies. 

Need for blended CTE programming: As COVID rages,  in-person CTE programs must pivot to remote/hybrid learning.  The lurch toward substituting Zoom for live instruction has failed and exacerbated  issues of learning loss and disengagement.

CTE market is highly fragmented.  CTE directors must procure licenses for each pathway, often having to manage proprietary, non-interoperable delivery systems with unique licensing, training, integration and support requirements. Content quality is highly variable: some dates back to video discs and 1990’s SCORM-based elearning. 

Middle skill gap and misalignment of CTE programs:  Nationwide, CTE programs are misaligned with local workforce needs. While large and growing workforce shortages affect middle income career paths, there is a glut of both high and low skill work forces.   

CTE Stigma: CTE’s negative stigma as the only graduation path for low academic performers keeps students from exploring these careers.

2030 Skills:  Automation, robotics, and AI are driving radical global transformations.   Most students will change careers 5 times and many will need skills for jobs that don’t exist yet.  Employers expect new hires to possess the skills and dispositions such as problem solving, collaboration, communication, empathy, and professionalism. Current CTE programs focus on technical skills over lifelong learning skills.

Core-LX offers a scalable method to create localized mastery-based CTE programs. We  help communities conduct mandatory Perkins V local needs assessments that identify labor market trends, especially middle-skills shortages.  This information informs programming, which is tailored to meet projected demand in high skill/high wage occupations. Local employers help identify employability skills which are folded into the CTE programming. 

Core-LX’s platform cultivates learner agency and its library of current CTE content enables programs to launch immediately.  A revenue sharing business model will drive the solution’s expansion. As Core-LX expands comprehensive coverage of all CTE pathways, the one-time fee subscriber/revenue sharing pool expands, attracting new publishers and incentivizing existing publishers to improve their offerings. This “flywheel” effect drives an ever-increasing momentum for building Core-LX’s CTE digital content library. 

Core-LX simplifies the management of CTE programs by offering all pathways under one license, one training process, one integration, with standards-compliant and interoperable data. Core-LX support for the IMS Global Comprehensive Learner Record provides a standardized transcript and portfolio for all student CTE competencies. 

Opportunity Youth: Equitable Pathways to Middle Skills Careers - The solution supports opportunity youth in making a pathway to middle skills careers. The platform cultivates learner agency, a key to lifelong learning, while CTE courses integrate and foster development of academic, technical and cross-sector competencies. 

To understand student needs, we look to secondary research but have also engaged youth voices through our Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) phase one study that was critical to our understanding of mastery learning impacts on students. 

Teachers: Core-LX helps teachers transition from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side” with a personalized, competency-based approach. The system is bundled with high-quality digital curriculum and the platform is instrumented to assist teachers in providing timely targeted feedback and support. 

Directors - Core-LX simplifies the management of CTE programs by offering all pathways under one license, one training process, one integration, with standards-compliant and interoperable data. 

Local Employers - Core-LX supports Perkins V Local Needs Assessments, helping CTE programs identify workforce trends. Research informs the program design, which may integrate middle school career exploration, high school CTE, adult continuing education and/or community college programs, increasing the pipeline of qualified candidates.

Core-LX’s approach to create sustainable jobs and livelihoods for underserved students includes:

1. Align local CTE and job training opportunities with Local Needs Assessment services to identify pathways to high-demand, high-paying middle skill careers

2. Increase the pipeline of CTE candidates by vertically integrating middle school, high school, adult and/or community college CTE programs

3. Deliver flexible and responsive CTE programming via the Core-LX mastery platform

4. Develop career readiness and learner agency to support lifelong learning 

5. Offer students opportunities to earn dual college credits and industry certifications

6. Curate learner academic, internship and workplace accomplishments via Comprehensive Learner Record 

• Project Lead - FT

• Technical Lead/Learning Engineer (PT contractor)

• Researcher- (PT contractor)

• Instructional Designer (PT contractor)

• Implementation coach - FT

• Engineering team (FT contractor)

CTE programs offer advantages to Opportunity Youth (in danger of dropping out or no longer in school nor working). Many have disabilities or are involved early with juvenile justice or child welfare systems. These youth are found inner-city and heavily represented in rural areas.

 A 2016 Fordham study found that students exposed to CTE are:

• more likely to graduate, enroll in a two-year college, be employed, and earn higher wages

• just as likely to pursue a four-year degree as peers 

• 21% more likely to graduate HS compared to similar students. 

Core-LX builds equity through:

- Access to high quality content (Research asserts teachers prepared with quality curriculum can be an equalizer in marginalized communities)

- Incentivizes to providers to meet the needs of all learners by paying higher royalties on content tailored to marginalized learners

- Development of learner agency (Research says in developing agency, we can develop strong young adults capable of effecting positive change in their own lives and the world around them).

Core-LX bundles its mastery learning platform (MLP) with “CTE Collection” - a multi-vendor CTE digital curriculum marketplace. In one sense we compete with other learning platforms that claim to be competency-based. These include Empower Learning, Summit Learning, and Oculus. Such MLP’s support core academic learning programs and have not focused on CTE.

Core-LX also competes with CTE digital curriculum providers including iCEV, Today’s Class, Electude, WIN, Lab Tech. These providers often utilize proprietary delivery systems, each requiring unique licensing, technical integration, training and support. These competitors are joining  our revenue sharing business as partners. 

Only Core-LX offers a multi-vendor best of breed digital curriculum running on a mastery learning platform. Our unique combination of capabilities has allowed us to create a sole source letter streamlining the procurement process. Our solution is unique in the following ways:

• Licensing: sold on an annual per-student license basis granting access to all pathways for one flat fee.  This simplifies procurement, integration, training, and support. 

• Multi-Vendor: Access to best of breed CTE curriculum that can be easily mixed and matched to enable personalization.

• Self-Publishing: Integrated professional content tools to enable teachers and independent curriculum providers to publish and earn royalties

• Mastery-Based Learning Model - in which students advance upon mastery and substantiate competency claims with evidence and artifacts. The approach naturally develops student agency, and career readiness skills.

• CLR - Mastery of competencies and evidence and artifacts captured in the CLR

• Job Matching - Curating and sharing CLR data via wallet application with job search engines.

Core-LX has bootstrapped and self-funded technology development. The platform is currently being used by white-label customers to create mastery-based programs for teacher certification test prep, teacher professional development, SPED and IEP programs. Core-LX originally targeted 6-12 core academics but found we were ahead of the market. In 2018, Core-LX was awarded an SBIR Phase 1 to study the intersection of CTE and competency-based learning. We  pivoted and have been laser focused on CTE since.

The technology was designed from the ground up to support a mastery-based instructional model using a mix and match library of content. The platform relies on standards to ensure interoperability.

• LTI - integration 3rd party content

• XAPI -  integration 3rd party content

• Learner Record Store - capture XAPI statements, track student usage and score data

• CASE - To import standards taxonomies and enable tagging and reporting

• Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) - captures student mastery of competencies and evidence into etranscript/portfolio

• CLR Wallet - (Planned) provide a wallet application enabling users to curate and share with prospective employers and college registrars

• Usage instrumentation and monitors - (To be enhanced) usage tracking, engagement and monitoring tools to help teachers identify student needs and provide targeted and timely support

• Engagement prompting - automated messaging to students to drive usage and engagement

• Integrated Assessment - with Learnosity authoring, delivery and reporting assessment platform

• Integrated Authoring Tools - enabling self-publishers to earn royalties

• AI recommendations (Planned) - AI engine to match instructional approaches and content with student needs

• Business intelligence - (Planned) data source aggregation and distribution to learning engineers 

In 2018, Core-LX was awarded an SBIR Phase 1 to study the intersection of competency-based learning with CTE. The study engaged local businesses to identify the key employability skills they require for new hires. These skills were integrated into a carpentry and plumbing trades program in Biddeford ME. 

The students used the platform to learn and earn badges of proficiency. They were required to regularly apply rubrics with proficiency scales to self-evaluate technical, academic and career skills. To earn a badge and be deemed “competent”, students were required to make assertions of their competency and back it up with evidence and artifacts. These self-assertions were then validated by the instructor. Where differences of opinion about a student’s competency arose between teacher and student,  they collaborated to create highly personalized strategies to close gaps.

At the end of the study, participating students reported to interviewers that being required to produce evidence of learning overwhelmingly increased their confidence in mastery. They felt more engaged with the content, and felt the learning was relevant. 

Core-LX is committed to further study how to help teachers create conditions of “productive struggle.” Further instrumenting content and platform will create a stream of data to be aggregated into a business intelligence platform from which researchers and learning engineers can ask and answer questions about student and teacher engagement.

Core-LX’s vision is to provide students-- especially opportunity youth-- with the skills and dispositions to pursue pathways to high paying, high demand careers in their own communities-- across a lifetime. 

The theory of change suggests locally-aligned, high quality CTE programs delivered using a competency-based approach will result in more students developing the employability skills and dispositions employers demand, and employers will enjoy a viable pipeline of qualified candidates for local middle skill jobs.

• The process begins with a a local needs assessment where researchers analyze labor market data to identify high demand, high paying middle skill jobs

• Researchers recruit stakeholders in target industries to participate in in surveys and interviews to reveal employability skills they require

• CTE programs develop vertically integrated programs that align middle school career exploration, high school CTE programming, dual credit, community college and on-going lifelong learning.

• Curriculum designers integrate academic, technical and career skills into CTE courses

• Teachers use the Core-LX platform to deliver and monitor personalized learning programs.

• Students make assertions about competency that are backed up by evidence that are evaluated by teachers

• Student competencies and evidence is recorded in a Comprehensive Learner Record

• Students publish the CLR data to their wallet application where they create curated views of their records

• Employers are matched with prospects based on CLR data

• Employers hire students

This personalized mastery-based approach supports the following results:

• CTE programs are aligned to communities needs

• Businesses become stakeholders in the priorities of CTE programs

• Students master academic, technical and career skills in the context of CTE programs

• Students take ownership of their learning and feel more confidence in their skills

• Students have higher levels of engagement and feel learning is relevant to their future

• CTE programs produce more qualified candidates for local employment opportunities

• The middle skill gap is narrowed in local communities

CTE programs implemented via the Core-LX system will increase the number of qualified candidates for local, high demand, high paying jobs. 

Programs that implement the platform with fidelity will:

• Decrease the middle skill gap by Increasing the number of CTE candidates for local middle skill jobs 

• Increase the number of students that earn certificates and/or dual credit in high school

• Increase the engagement of businesses in workplace learning programs

• Increase student confidence in their own abilities

• Increase the number of students who continue to college or alternate credential programs

To achieve these goals, Core-LX is creating a new ecosystem to assemble the world’s most comprehensive library of CTE digital curriculum, covering all major pathways.  The courses offered will be aligned to major certification exams providing students the opportunity to earn college credits and industry recognized certifications.

The Core-LX revenue-sharing business model will drive flywheel expansion of content coverage and growth. As more commercial publishers and entrepreneurial self-publishers add CTE content to the platform, more subscribers join and add revenue to the royalty pool. Large revenue-sharing pools incentivize publishers to continually improve and expand their CTE education offerings.  Because the system meters content usage at the activity level, each publisher has incentive to continually expand and improve their offerings down to the activity level. 

This will have the effect of creating an every expanding and ever improving source of digital curriculum. 

Funding is the major obstacle. As of November 2020, Core-LX was running on revenue and lacked the resources needed to capitalize on the clear demand for hybrid CTE programming. We had to walk away from about $120,000 in revenue because we didn’t have the resources to support a large client.  

Our primary priorities are: investment in the content acquisition and pre-pay royalties for high value content, customer support teams, improving the platform UX and performance, and increasing our marketing and sales teams.

Formal validation trials are also critical. We want to understand the conditions by which CLX works most effectively-- for whom, in which contexts, and why?

Prior to COVID, our second  biggest obstacle was resistance to change. CTE has been traditionally hands-on. CTE teachers are often professionals who come to teaching as a second career; they lack the teaching and technical skills to adapt to hybrid or personalized, mastery-based teaching. However, COVID and the overnight switch to remote and hybrid learning has hastened change.

- Core-LX will address the funding issue by opening a seed round and identifying potential investors. We have a pitch deck, financial model, executive summary, product demo, and cap table ready for diligence. Core-LX is developing a list of angel and seed investors and working with our friends and advisors to get warm introductions. 

- We wish to address formal validation pilots with this grant.

- To address the resistance to change, Core-LX will develop a strong post-sale customer support infrastructure that will:

1. Provide teachers with foundational technical and digital literacy skills

2. Provide teachers with foundational teaching skills for how to be an online teacher

3. Provide teachers with comprehensive on-boarding training and on-going coaching and live support

The programs are new and have not yet had the time to collect a statistically relevant sample.  However, as researchers we would like to measure:

• How many go on to college

• How many go into careers

• How many earn more certifications

• Average income 5 years after graduation

• Quality of life - are they happy with their careers?

N/A

Jeffery Katzman was the visionary, founder, and VP of Product Development at CourseNet, where he developed the first-generation of award winning educational interactive CD ROMs for higher education publishers. After a successful exit, Jeff founded Xyleme, Inc., the current market-leading learning content management system used by the largest US companies, universities, and publishers.  

Chris Sawwa is a learning engineer and entrepreneur. Sawwa went from self-learning BASIC, Assembler, C, Lisp and Prolog in high school to designing and building global web SaaS & PaaS platforms and helping to create new eLearning standards (SCORM, CMI-5, xAPI, RTWS @ ADL, IEEE/LTSC, AICC and LETSI). 

Lisa Duty, Ph.D. is the principal of Innovation Partners America. She has over twenty years of experience in education research, strategy and partnerships. Duty is the seventh child of parents with sixth and eighth grade educations, and brings an Appalachian, (formerly) low income, first-gen college-goer perspective to all of her work.

Simón Flores is an Instructional Designer with a background in Philosophy and Literature. As a Manager of Education and Training at Xyleme, Inc. he led the technical documentation of complex learning application solutions and developed training curricula to onboard new users. Later, as Content Development Lead for Accenture Creative he infused innovation into the content production process. 

Gordon Rogers is a 25 year veteran of start-ups in the field of education technology and online learning, beginning in 1992, when he founded a company that created one of the industry’s first learning management systems. 

Because we are a multi-vendor marketplace, we have established relationships with publishing partners, and other providers in the ecosystem.

CTE Content Partners

• Pointful Education

• Today’s Class

• LabTech

• American Culinary Foundation

• ESCO

• American Welding Society

• ACT

• Centerpoint Learning

• PHeT

• Toolwire

• MyTechHigh

• PrepMagic

• Common Craft

• And adding more providers daily

Ecosystem Partners

• CTE Portfolio - to support workplace learning programs

• Public Consulting Group - channel partner for CTE

• IMS Global Consortium to provide interoperability standards

• Colorado River BOCES - distribution channel

• Colorado Department of Labor and Employment - Labor market analysis 

• NOCTI - certification provider

• Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School

Core-LX offers  K-12 school districts a comprehensive, standards-aligned, plug-and-play blended delivery CTE program for a flat-rate, per student subscription fee.  The fee includes access to the entire course catalog, similar to the Netflix approach to TV watching, as well as teaching support tools, analytics and course creation capabilities.  Schools can instantly get CTE students back on track with academic, career, and social skills development with minimal technology investment.  

Beneficiaries include students who develop mastery of skills that will lead to certification and stable employment. Independent course developers, including teachers, also benefit from our royalty sharing model, which lets them generate income by contributing their self-authored courses to the Core-LX Collection.  

As the breadth and depth of the catalog grows, we are able to support more students with career enhancing skills.  More users on the platform in turn attracts new publishers and authors, enhancing the so-called flywheel effect.  

The  Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) or a Learning and Employment Record (LER) gives individuals ownership and control of a verified and detailed record of their skills and achievements. It can be shared with educational institutions and employers, and is far more granular than a traditional academic transcript.  The LER enables educational, social, and economic mobility for people with varying backgrounds and skill sets.  

Other stakeholders are employers and workforce development agencies. The LER reduces the friction in hiring, by facilitating job matching based on accurate skills profiles and seamlessly sharing applicants’ credentials with potential employers.    

The mission of the Reimagining Pathways to Employment program is in direct alignment with our own. We envision being the center of a new ecosystem of products and services that help students and workers achieve a high quality of life through alternate credentials. 

This work will require productive and engaged partnerships to solve big problems. Winning the MIT Solve Challenge will give Core-LX gravitas to make connections to the ecosystem partners required to affect change. This includes coordination and engagement from certification/credential organizations, CTE training programs, policymakers,  government, technology providers, service providers and funders. 

The prize award addresses an urgent need: Partnership and capital to formally validate our work at a next level of scale. This will help us improve CLX and attract investments necessary to capture new and existing opportunities. 

Core-LX has bootstrapped and has been self-funded by small investments from friends and family. As experienced entrepreneurs, we are “jacks of all trades - and masters of none”. Our lean management team has allowed us to survive. In the face of clear product/market fit and the opportunity to grow much faster,  we’ve been limited in ability to scale by our lack of resources. In fact, we’ve had to turn down contracts with larger customers because we don’t have the resources to adequately support them.

To grow we will need to augment our team with these roles:

• Director of  Marketing  

• Regional Sales Rep

• Customer Success Director

• UX designer 

• Senior Architect and Developer

We also could also benefit from mentors regarding our pricing models.

• Local Workforce Boards and Chambers of Commerce - to help define local needs and identify key industry stakeholders to engage

• MIT Solve Reimagining Pathways ecosystem - for expertise/to help advance learner success through diversity, inclusion and equity commitments

• IBM - Additional technical prowess

• Nationally recognized certification providers - (NCCR, ASE, AFNR, NOCTI, NHBA, ACF etc) to ensure curriculum is aligned with certifications, and provide students the access and opportunity to earn industry certifications while in schools

• Regional Community Colleges - to ensure alignment with middle and high school programs to ensure seamless pathway support as students move from middle, to high school and on to community college.

• IMS Global - to promote the adoption of the Comprehensive Learner Record

• Career exploration solutions -like Nepris, or World of Work to offer middle and high school students career exploration opportunities

• CTE digital curriculum providers to broaden and deepen content coverage

• Personality and Motivation Assessment Provider like Indigo Project, YouScience, or Pairin

• Workplace learning tracking system like CTE Tutor