Decentralising Education

The proliferation of credentials has been an enduring trend of modern times. Credentialing has been defined as a process through which person’s qualities are approved or recognised by an authority. Credentials, including educational and academic credentials, help establish the expertise and social position of the holder. The Internet and related digital media have created unprecedented opportunities to connect, communicate and learn. In the digital age learners also need new opportunities to aggregate their learning achievements and associated evidence of learning from multiple sources in a portable, digital, interoperable and verifiable way. Digital Credentials such as Open Badges (Mozilla) and Blockcerts (MIT) have been only recently developed as open standards which enable an open, digital infrastructure and an ecosystem of digital credentials. Digital credentials based on Open Badges and/or Blockcerts can be designed to represent valid indicators of specific achievements such as competencies, skills, knowledge and diverse accomplishments, point to evidence of such achievements and share digital representations of these achievements across the web. Schools, universities, employers and informal learning providers globally have been using digital credentials to capture life-long and life-wide learning which may have otherwise remained unrecognised. This talk explores the evolution of credentials from a historical perspective and provides an overview of the recent developments in digital credentialing with the focus on various concepts, technologies, uses and functions of digital credentials. This talk also provides recommendations for moving forward with digital credentials in the digital age.