Speaker 1: I'm thinking back to the to the theme of CV exchange of football now in the US and being

Speaker 2: our football.

Speaker 1: Well, exactly. So it's football in the US. But to most of the world, football means what we call soccer. And here in Australia, footy or football could mean Aussie rules football, could mean Rugby League or could mean Rugby Union based on where you live. So the context that look, you know, the geographic location, but also the environment that someone's in, you know, those those words in and of themselves mean mean different things. So how important is it to have a library and common definitions to be able to see a dictionary so that so that we can all speak to each other and have that that ontology and and translation layer so that employers and educational institutions and most importantly, learners understand and have that context?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think it's absolutely essential, right? We trade when you think about a currency, and we will often say we want competencies to be the currency of learning. I want to be able to exchange competencies. Well, I can't exchange competencies if we have different definitions, if we measure them differently, if we weight them differently, right? How much is this competency worth? What what is the weight of this? Is that similar to what you think of as a credit hour or 15 hours of instructional time, which is all we have to tether to today, right? So if we don't have common definitions, if we don't have similar ways of measuring what we mean by that competency, if we don't if we don't start working on the ontology and coming to agreement on the ontology, we won't be able to replace time, especially in the US, as the measurement of learning, right? That's what we use today. How many credit hours do you have? How many minutes is your butt set in a classroom seat? Or how many hours do I think you probably spent studying for that? And instead, we would say, I can take this demonstration for the equivalent of that demonstration. I'm looking for somebody who can do this. They scored this on that performance based assessment. That's similar to this. Therefore, I can accept that. And unless we start to build out the systems that allow us to barter in competency, unless we build out the ontology so that we're using the same words to mean the same things, we're going to continue to talk at each other and not be able to connect learning. So it's absolutely essential. I think you saw in the World Economic Forum report, it says you need to have a common skills language. You may have to start in your own country building your common skills language, but I do that with an eye to what are other people building? How could we connect? How could we leverage? So in Illinois, going back to that Illinois example, the language is now shared in 77 of the 78 academic institutions that have education programs. 77 of the 78 institutions said, I'll align around those common definitions. They now share assessment tools so that now if I administer that assessment at my institution and a learner passed, I can know that if they went to my institution at the next institution, they would pass too, right? So we can, through a common assessment, begin to share learning. And it's not so much based on time anymore, it's based on what that learner has been able to demonstrate that they know and can do. But it took putting that undergirding in place first, right? Getting that language together.

Speaker 1: Excellent. Excellent. That's so encouraging to hear those.

Speaker 2: The work you all are doing is so essential, right? Don't be discouraged when so many people are like, oh, we can't align around. It's exactly what we need. We need those libraries. We need those skills definitions to power a new way of learning, right? That connected way that says to my janitor, you've got knowledge, skills, abilities, and I have a way to validate that that's going to mean something not only here, but in other countries as well.

Speaker 1: Brilliant. Brilliant. No, thank you for those kind words. And it is all, you know, from our perspective, it's about creating these open global libraries that everyone can access and contribute to so that we are- Open.

Speaker 2: Yes. Open. Absolutely. It's amazing how quick we go to territorial, isn't it? Right. We want to create something open and then I'll be able to monetize all the spinoffs from it, right? Yeah. No, we really want an open ontology so that we can begin to share in the future of learning.

Speaker 1: Absolutely.