Our Future Plans
The Clearinghouse’s vision is to be the acknowledged go-to source for education and workforce data, insights, and learner enablement.
Transforming to Make Our Vision a Reality
In order for the Clearinghouse to bring our vision to life, we must establish a national data, reporting, analytical, and insights-enabling infrastructure. This national infrastructure will include democratized data, platforms, and applications designed to inform, facilitate, and enhance learner mobility, progression, and success.
This work will benefit our key stakeholders in important ways:
- Learners will benefit from expanded access to their education and workforce credentials.
- Educational institutions will benefit from expanded data and insights that greatly enhance their capabilities to inform pathways and design and execute strategies for credential completion, which will directly impact learner trajectories.
- Workforce and microcredential issuers as well as educational institutions will benefit by leveraging nimbler data within trusted environments containing learning and employment record-based data enabling both academic and skill-based progressions for learners.
To make this bold vision a reality, we must begin by establishing a strong foundation on which we can build the Clearinghouse of the future — a national data ecosystem that is secure, accessible, adaptable, efficient, scalable, and interoperable while protecting student privacy.
Over the next 18 months, we will work toward our vision by pursing three major initiatives. Each of these initiatives is interconnected, and together, they enable the Clearinghouse’s evolution, unlocking the power of the right data, at the right time, for the right use.
1. Moving to the Cloud
Our multiyear effort to move to the cloud is designed to accelerate the Clearinghouse’s transformation into a modern data and technology organization, which will encompass:
- Re-architecting the data infrastructure
- Re-platforming the data environment into the cloud (Amazon Web Services)
- Reengineering our business processes to modernize our service delivery in concert with our platforms
- Beginning the migration of all of our product and service applications into the cloud environment
Transforming our infrastructure will increase the Clearinghouse’s value to the education and workforce communities by improving the scalability, efficiency, and usability of our products and services. This will allow us to better support our growing number of stakeholders with nimble, flexible, and responsive platforms enabling their education-to-workforce learner journeys and outcomes-focused goals.
Enabling robust data interoperability is critical to this effort, as we seek to enable the data in our eco-system to operate in harmony with many other data sources across the broader education and workforce data ecosystem. The responsive platforms we are creating rely on foundational data, and the degree of that data’s interoperability determines how agile, and ultimately how useful, the data will be.
By transitioning to the cloud, the Clearinghouse will be ready to supercharge our data support and research platforms, such as the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) and StudentTracker®, enabling these platforms and others — to seamlessly converge into a single incomparable national research and analytical asset.
2. Expanding Insights Through Expanded Data Sets
Our goal is to be the most comprehensive and reliable data resource for the education and workforce communities in the country. To deliver greater value to our stakeholders, the Clearinghouse aims to enable new and greater insights by deepening and broadening the data sets that we use.
We are expanding data breadth to include data that extends across the universe of education and workforce communities, building on-ramps and proactive migration paths to turn data into more actionable insights. Examples include:
- Industry credentials providers
- Nontraditional educational organizations
- Nonprofit and trade association credential providers
- Other workforce credential providers
Interoperability is key to this work, as our stakeholders need partners who can help them scale their data capabilities.
Many of these new data sources are third parties that do not use the Clearinghouse’s products or services. Because third-party data must be managed differently, we are establishing intake processes to enable us to augment our existing data. Through our third-party data intake work, we will create data pipelines to give us a repeatable process for moving third-party data sets into the Clearinghouse’s environment, into a Secure Experimental Area (SEA), and then into various production processes after the data value has been identified and verified.
3. Converting Data into Action
Here are other examples where the Clearinghouse is connecting the dots between data and action in several ways:
- Making it possible for schools to reengage students who have stopped out before earning a credential, bringing noncompleters back to campus
- Enabling nationwide access to data and insights for educators and researchers
- Creating a robust, one-stop environment to help schools better tell their unique stories
- Evolving our research platforms (PDP and StudentTracker) into a single, powerful data asset
- Creating a full picture of learners’ education and employment achievements by expanding the power of Myhub, a single, secure, online, self-service point of access to their combined records and credentials from all Myhub-participating institutions and providers
- Participating in conversations about blockchain’s potential to increase records’ utility and security
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Together, we can continue to enable learner success
For nearly three decades, the Clearinghouse has worked in partnership with educational institutions and organizations nationwide that have provided the collaboration and support to help us grow our service mission and help your grantees fulfill their education-related goals.
The Clearinghouse’s high-impact initiatives can maximize the philanthropic yield of your organization’s investments and contribute to the collective impact that the Clearinghouse, along with its grantees and partners, has on learners’ lives nationwide.
Because we make it easier and simpler for thousands of colleges, universities, high schools, and educational organizations to better serve their learners, the Clearinghouse can — through our services — enable your organization to amplify your impact across the education and workforce communities and, most importantly, on the lives of millions of learners.
Find out how the Clearinghouse can partner with and enable your organization to make a difference in the lives of learners who will shape our world tomorrow.
Contact us today.