Blockchain evolution brought a lot of use cases. One of the most compelling use cases is digital badging, which seems to be one of the native blockchain application. Digital badges are digital assets that are prone to fraud and need to be protected in immutable ledgers with cryptographic security. They are also digital commodities that require to be exchanged safely between earners, educators and employers that are usually highly independent, with weak ties to each other. These two factors make blockchain an ideal medium for retention of educational records or digital badges.
Open Badges & Why The Movement Matters?
Open badges is the new standard for digital badge metadata that can be used to describe any form of accomplishment, whether a completion of an academic course, submission of a course, participation in an event or any other form of formal or informal achievement. Open badges enable the content of the badges to be exchanged between interested parties. This includes badges earners, the learners, educators and (potential) employers. When a unified standard is applied we can imagine a world where university registry is integrated with corporate learning management system; enabling earners to share tens or hundreds of mini-achievements that together form their profiles. This obviously is in contrast to the traditional one page CV that we used to be advised to use in the corporate world over the last few decades. In that sense, badges, and their associated skills, can be viewed as the microcredentials or building blocks of the CV of the future.
When a unified standard is applied we can imagine a world where university registry is integrated with corporate learning management system; enabling earners to share tens or hundreds of mini-achievements that together form their profiles.
Blockchain for Education
As open badges are micro-credentials that need to be secured against mutability, but enjoy a high degree of transferability between federated, or sometimes unfederated organizations, the need to blockchain emerges as a secure decentralized ledger of open badge assets. Blockchain also brings a lot of needed features, such as digital signature of certificates by issuers to guarantee authenticity and encrypted communication between verifying organizations and the badge earners.
In simple words, using the blockchain to “notarise” degree certificates for universities and academic institutions (among other benefits enabled by the digital transformation) eliminates any sort of forgery and identifies with certainty the issuer and the recipient of a certificate, speeding up the verification process thanks to disintermediation.
Using the blockchain to “notarise” degree certificates for universities and academic institutions eliminates any sort of forgery and identifies with certainty the issuer and the recipient of a certificate
Therefore, it becomes essential for universities to be able to count on the support of a system for the management, tracking, assignment and verification of digital credentials and at the same time to be able to integrate the use of this tool in all relevant areas: online education, career guidance, job placement and others. The blockchain technology can be seen as a new digital notary solution for Universities and it can represent a solution for tracking the learning experiences of an individual in heterogeneous contexts and with multiple identities which can be identified and connected to the same subject.