Talking Performance Improvement and Certificates with MedBiquitous

No one involved with continuing education—not learners, not designers, certainly not LMS product owners—likes certificates. One of our best attended webinars ever was The Certificate is Obsolete: New Ways to Track PD, CE and Certification, which covered a couple of new options for reporting on learning activities, specifically Mozilla Open Badges and xAPI. Watch that webinar (follow the link) for my complete tirade on how certificates are an out-of-date way of performing the very important job of tracking continuing education and performance improvement.

Shortly after presenting in that webinar I went to the annual meeting of MedBiquitous. MedBiq is a group of innovators who create standards for, and generally push the boundaries of, medical education technology. I learned there, to my surprise, about another effort to get past the certificate: MedBiquitous’s Activity Report standard. Major medical organizations are already zapping certificate information directly from providers to certification organizations using this technology that supports this standard.