Executive summary

       There is a gap between education credentials and job attainment, among other modern concerns for at least three groups of learners pursuing careers in technology; college students (undergraduate and graduate), primarily self-taught students, and post-college career changers. CITDL aims to help people build their unique paths that will bridge the gap. To accomplish this, we want to research and develop a platform that facilitates the answers to at least three implicit questions of modern learners. First, what is the most immediate thing to creatively fulfill the experience gap besides internships? Second, what essential knowledge domains and domain skills do I want to master in the technology field? How can I put together and translate the knowledge, skills, and experience into an overall credible background of meaningful experiences while not, for example, yet job-ready and between internships (or before college graduation)? Everybody now knows that going to college and getting a degree is not enough. Experience and proof of expertise now compete with mere credentials.

       Our platform is OnRamp. OnRamp is for every learner that provides a workspace that we call a Journey1 While goal orientation is good, there is presently an overemphasis on attaining our goals that crowd out the creative process for establishing our learning path. For example, by graduation year, a pivotal question is left unanswered: “Why did I learn all of this and for what?”

       Much of what we need to know for a job is available to consume, get the dream job, and earn money quickly and ideally. There is nothing wrong with this approach. However, there is so much that we need to know that it is challenging to engage in significant and creative activities as a byproduct of our fast learning process. And how often do leading learning institutions challenge learners to slow down long enough to think about their thinking and learning as they create? Meaning and purpose has been consigned to the backseat, figuratively speaking, if not also sacrificed at the altar of prestige and credentialing.

       OnRamp goes against the grain by providing a place not simply to build a profile of posted credentials and a friends list of references, but to provide a means to formulate job-relevant vision and action. The Triple Graph is like a timeline that runs linearly and in the online space (think of a workspace or canvas) called a Journey. Build a Path within set time constraints between each point of experience. Or the user can build a Path with no time constraints at all. A user can also do a combination of the two.Time or no time constraints, the user can create an Experience to place on a Path on their Triple Graph. An Experience is like a point on a timeline. While Paths naturally meander, they are still rooted in time and place. The Experience is composed of three sub-components: Knowledge, Creation, and Documentation. The user can build a record of knowledge learned (domain knowledge). Then they are encouraged to apply and present their knowledge in a completed and purpose-driven project (creation). Finally, the user is encouraged to reflect, modify, and package their work in narrative use-case form (documentation). Within each subcomponent are experience guidelines in the form of questions. Before: Why do I want to learn a subject? What are the ways I want to learn it?; During: What am I getting from this learning experience? Would I like to learn more through to completion? Do I want to develop my project solo or on a team? Who can/should use what I/we create?; After: What do I know now that I did not know before? How can I apply what I learned? What can I do now that I could not do before? What do I appreciate or want to improve in my project?

       Experiences allow media-rich integrations for the learning sources (college courses, YouTube, Coursera, Free Code Camp, etc.) and import, and a place to present the completed project. As the user completes an experience and adds more to their Triple Graph, OnRamp can predictively create a graphical presentation. OnRamp will show the user possible areas of interest within the technology field and graphically draw a connection from key functional and non-functional aspects of their completed project to real-world requirements in job descriptions without having to leave the OnRamp application. From there the user can create a visual data-driven path from one completed Experience to a newly created Experience.

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_{¹ Metaspace is used uniquely here with the knowledge that the “metaverse” is the future of the internet for social networking platforms. In a similar sense, Onramp will embrace what we call Source-knowledge Agnosticism. If you learned something from a reliable source and built something valuable with your knowledge, why not hire you?}