Dear Consortium Members,
I am writing to share some exciting news about the future of the Mastery Transcript Consortium. Legend.org, an AI-native education assessment platform, has acquired MTC from ETS and the new entity will operate as Mastery.org. I am thrilled to be returning to the MTC work as the chair of the Education Advisory Council.
The two years of stewardship from ETS has been an important precursor to this next chapter, and I know they will continue to be supporters of Mastery.org going forward. That said, I am beyond excited by what Legend.org's expertise, resources and engineering team will mean to the ability to accelerate MTC's mission, and our goal of providing mastery learning to all students and to capture and display that learning to higher ed institutions so they can provide the right opportunities to the right students.
I originally met the founders of Legend.org, Aaron Rasmussen and Matt Sornson, while they were developing their teacher-assistive technology to parse authentic student work. Aaron serves on the Board of Trustees at the Carnegie Foundation, and we were introduced through that connection. Mastery Transcripts provided ideal examples for them as they developed their theory of how students should be best represented. Months later, I was happy to hear they decided that MTC was already the best way to represent students, and they began negotiating with ETS to acquire the MTC. Aaron and Matt deeply understand our mission and have the experience, network and resources to help us get the important work of mastery learning done.
When I founded the Mastery Transcript Consortium in 2016, I did it for a simple reason: to create a way for the whole, unique, child to be seen by colleges and employers for who they really are, not distilled down to a GPA. It felt like a longshot then, but ten years later we have over 800 colleges accepting students with a Mastery Transcript/Mastery Learning Record and now we have partners with the expertise to ensure we can harness the power of AI to make our work easier, more accessible and more impactful.
As the chair of the Educational Advisory Council, I'm in the process of "getting the band together" while adding some important new partners. Please feel free to reach out to me or Jason Cummings with any questions you have.
This is a new era for MTC, and the timing is perfect as the rise of AI is putting into greater focus the need to move beyond grades as the only signal of a student's skills. We know there is a better way, and I'm excited to be part of the effort again and to help expand and accelerate our collective work of the MTC.
Sincerely,
Scott Looney
Chair, Advisory Council, Mastery.org
Founder, MTC | Head of School, Hawken School