Ed3 Weekly: Credentials for Days

This week’s issue is dedicated to the world of credentialing. When discussing the disruption of web3 this is probably the most commonly mentioned use case. It gets to the heart of many people’s frustration with the current structures of our education systems. The system of sorting using traditional grading has removed the joy and creativity from learning.

I am not an expert on credentialing. There are others who are much more knowledgeable than I am such as Simone Ravaioli, Doug Belshaw (find one of his pieces in this newsletter), and Robert Bajor. What I do have is a lot of experience designing and leading project experiences at K-12 schools. There is a dissonance between the types of skills that students are developing in these performance assessments, and the grades being put into their report cards and transcripts.

I have spent many hours trying to “hack” learning management systems to account for this dissonance. This has not led me to an effective solution, regardless of my attempts to circumvent those systems that have been designed to sort students.

I envision an on-chain system that blends the worlds of competency assessment with credentialing. We need to implement a system that can honor the skill development that students achieve inside and outside the walls of our schools. The system also needs to be transferable between schools and geographies.

For this issue, I cover some of the possibilities of this emergent system. They provide some of the building blocks that contain the characteristics we need–transferable, decentralized, secure, human and machine-readable, controllable, user-friendly, and customizable. Check out the resources for this week and learn more about what I am talking about:

👖 Arizona State wants to put all your credentials right in your pocket

📛 Open badges are evolving and you should know the current news

📜 Getting Smart is talking about how competency-based learning and credentials can work together

🎓 Can we put the portrait of a graduate on the blockchain?

Credentials in Your Pocket

Arizona State University has positioned itself as an innovator of higher learning. This announcement continues their pursuit to offer dynamic digital experiences for their students. This digital wallet will allow students to store their traditional and non-traditional educational credentials using cryptographic techniques to ensure authenticity.

There are a number of benefits to using verifiable digital wallets to store credentials. These include ease of verification, improved security, and streamlining of processes. Check out this article to learn more about how ASU will use these and a use case from a student’s perspective.

What’s New With Open Badges

Have you heard of Open Badges? This is a good time to jump in. This LinkedIn article shares some recent updates. If you’re so technically included you can go right to the source document, but I appreciate this easy-to-read summary.

Here are the main updates to the platform:

• Using a decentralized identifier (DID) instead of email addresses
• Replacing the image requirements with a human- and machine-readable standard
• User control of what information to share and with whom

Some of this is pretty technical and if you’re not already using Open Badges it may not mean anything to you. The important thing is that as these protocols become more widely used, they are being designed to operate more easily and efficiently. Great news for us educators!

Competency-Based Learning and Digital Credentials

Maybe you caught me sharing this article in my LinkedIn feed this past week. But it is so good I had to include it in my newsletter as well. This article brings together two things that have typically existed separately, on-chain credentials and systems of competency-based learning.

I am not sure if it is a check-and-egg situation. Is it the credentials that create the demand for systems acknowledging specific competencies, or the other way around? Regardless, the fusing of these two concepts will be key for innovating our legacy systems of grading and tracking learning.

As Kirstan Osborne, an educator from the Balmoral Hall School for Girls in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada says this will “improve student agency in learning, provide real-world context and the opportunity to look at learning through a different lens, and promote the idea that schools should be part of and not apart from the community.”

The Potential for On-chain Transcripts

This last article isn’t necessarily web3 related, but I think it is an essential part of the puzzle. The Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) has been at the forefront of skills-based assessment for students. Their “portrait of a graduate” has impacted how a number of schools design their systems of grading. As shown in the graphic above it create a picture of the learner that is more skills and competency-based.

I hope that the MTC will be able to level up its work through the development of a decentralized and on-chain system to track these credits. In its current state, the MTC appears to be an internal software system that member schools can sign up to use. Unfortunately, this doesn’t align with the open-source spirit of web3. I will be following them closely to see if they embrace blockchain technology.

Thank you for stopping by for another issue of my web3🤝education newsletter. You can join over 300 others and subscribe to the newsletter on LinkedIn or join the SubStack here. Link to all my work by checking out my blog.