Propelling understanding and adoption of verifiable digital credentials
The Digital Credentials Consortium and the W3C Verifiable Credentials for Education
The Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC) was founded by 12 higher education institutions across North America and Europe with the primary objective to design an infrastructure for verifiable digital credentials that could best serve the needs of key stakeholders in the education and employment ecosystem, including learners, employers and academic institutions. A key consideration for designing this infrastructure is supporting the interoperability of the credentials through the use of open standards including the W3C Verifiable Credentials data model.
The DCC founded and currently co-chairs the W3C Verifiable Credentials for Education Task Force (VC-EDU). This task force’s charter includes demonstrating how learning, employment, and achievement credentials can operate as Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and encourage understanding through discussion, documentation, and example data models. In 2022, VC-EDU focused on publishing use cases, participated in aligning education standards with VCs, collaborated on interoperability initiatives, elevated the work of vendors and work by the community, and provided space for discussions about challenges that arise in the ecosystem. Each of these efforts are intended to increase understanding of verifiable credentials in education and training to progress towards adoption.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, the VC-EDU community submitted the digital credential use cases integral to their work. The task force published a draft of the use cases as a starting point. It describes the various user roles in a VC ecosystem, the user needs, and the user tasks. The use cases describe common scenarios in education and employment such as completion of degrees and micro-credentials, and also delves into challenging topics such as credential display and self-asserted credentials that are likely to be discussed in the coming year.
To contribute to understanding and actual implementation of interoperable systems, the VC-EDU Task Force collaborated with Jobs for the Future (JFF) on two plugfests. The first plugfest illuminated the recent alignment of the Open Badges 3.0 specification (proposed by the task force in 2021) by requiring that participating VC wallets could display a credential that conformed to the specification. The second plugfest took interoperability to the next level by requiring that issuing platforms transport Open Badges 3.0 to VC wallets. This year, the task force continues to collaborate with JFF for Plugfest 3 which will focus on presenting credentials to verifiers.
Open Badges 3.0 and Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) 2.0 reached candidate final status in 2022. This work with these standards at 1EdTech was bolstered by the task force community that submitted issues to their respective code repositories to fix bugs and make improvements. This year, it’s expected that community members will have applications in production using these specifications and provide demos at the VC-EDU weekly calls.
As part of their education efforts, the VC-EDU task force will continue to engage the community in discussion around a range of topics including understanding decentralized identifiers, learning data models in Europe, and Web 3. This year, the task force will expand upon education opportunities to help increase acceptance and adoption of Verifiable Credentials. The group meets every Monday at 8am PT/11am ET and everyone, regardless of technical experience is welcome to join.
Propelling understanding and adoption of verifiable digital credentials was originally published in MIT Open Learning on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.