Open the Door for Social Mobility With Digital Credentials
"Education is the platform that makes it possible to defeat all barriers." - unknown
Economic mobility is certainly a barrier. If we want to improve educational outcomes, the Digital Credentials, which provide the means for sharing and trusting important information about what a student or user has learned and is competent to do, are the means for improving educational outcomes and achieving economic mobility.
GreenLight Credentials is at the forefront of opening the door for social mobility by matching verified digital credentials with education and employment opportunities. We believe a markedly better way of thinking about digital credentials and their value by removing three challenges to their universal adoption.
The first challenge is standardization. Learners and employees accumulate a myriad of educational credits and degrees to competency-based badges earned on the job, and points in between over their lifetime. These credentials may be un-standardized an not easily transferable, and when they are transferable, may not provide the recipient with the proper context for assessing their value. Standardization can solve this issue.
The second challenge is ownership or control. A secure digital locker containing life-long learning credentials that can be repeatedly shared can solve this problem. The final challenge is data, itself. Whether we like it or not, data is today’s life-blood. Unfortunately, it is frequently in accessible by the person most affected – the true owner, the subject of the data. Granting the owner control over his or her data allows more opportunity for matching an individual’s achievements, skills, and potential.
Standards, such as the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR), provide the ability for the one dimensional academic transcripts, badges and certifications to be transformed into multi-dimensional records through the inclusion of non-classroom achievements, military and work records, activities such as volunteer work, apprenticeship and internship experiences, etc. The current ability for independent verification of such achievements through digitally signed assertions provides the needed trust in such documents to make them valuable. Using the immutability of the blockchain can make this simpler and much more manageable.
Students can dynamically create their learner records from other types of academic records such as the traditional transcripts, open badges, certificates, certifications, recommendation letters, evidence of projects, etc. As standards and technologies such as W3C Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers (DID), Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (DPKI) through blockchain networks such as Sovrin or Velocity become widely adopted, institutions will become issuers and verifiers of data. Learners will benefit from the ability to receive verifiable credentials from any source of life-long learning and own them forever.