A new report authored by 12 universities charts path to developing infrastructure for issuing, sharing, and verifying digital credentials of academic achievement
Technology has the potential to profoundly change higher education. However, the way that academic credentials are issued and managed has not yet taken advantage of the possibilities of digital technology, according to a new white paper authored by the Digital Credentials Consortium — a group of 12 international universities with expertise in the design of verifiable digital academic credentials. The Consortium’s report furthers a global effort that began earlier this year within academia to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that becomes the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying digital academic credentials.
“We’ve been exploring how recent advances in public key infrastructures, public ledgers, and blockchains can be used to rethink the way we recognize academic achievements,” said Philipp Schmidt, advisor to the Vice President of Open Learning at MIT. “We’ve set our sights on the design and governance of a technology infrastructure for academic credentials – transforming credentials into tokens of social and human capital that can create new opportunities for participation in education and industry. Our report marks the first step in the process.”
In the white paper, the authors — all affiliated with institutions of higher education — outline a number of standards that they believe would expand upon previous efforts to develop verified digital academic credentials, calling for:
- More flexible ways to express the identities of issuers and learners that tie into existing university services.
- Stronger privacy-by-design and privacy-by-default with attention to regional legal frameworks.
- More reliable revocation mechanisms and credential lifecycle management.
- More direct learner agency over one's lifelong learning record.
- Higher level of consistency between the machine-readable data of the credential, the human-readable visual representation, and the necessary output formats—paper or digital.
While the Digital Credentials Consortium is primarily concerned with the use of verified digital academic credentials in higher education, their work also reflects a broader effort to bridge post-secondary and lifelong learning, connecting traditional institutions of higher education, non-formal education providers, as well as the workplace, through interoperable standards.
In the white paper, the Consortium also outlines a commitment to open source and open standards.
“Our goal is to contribute to an education landscape that increases learner agency and promotes more equitable learning and career pathways,” said MIT Professor Krishna Rajagopal, Dean for Digital Learning. “Our focus is the design of the standard and development of a transparent governance model that keeps the learner’s rights at the center.”
About the Digital Credentials Consortium
The Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC) was founded in 2018 by leading universities with expertise in the design of verifiable digital academic credentials. Driven by a mission to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that becomes the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying digital academic credentials, the DCC’s goal is to contribute to an education landscape that increases learner agency and promotes more equitable learning and career pathways. While the Consortium is primarily concerned with use-cases in higher education, their work is also part of a broader effort to bridge post-secondary and lifelong learning, connecting traditional institutions of higher education, non-formal education providers, as well as the workplace, through interoperable standards. Learn more at digitalcredentials.mit.edu.
Founding Members, Digital Credentials Consortium
Delft University of Technology
Georgia Institute of Technology
Harvard University
Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
McMaster University
Tecnológico De Monterrey
Technical University of Munich
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Irvine
University of Milano-Bicocca
University of Toronto