Since the start of this year I’m working with a client in the education sector. Their aim is to investigate whether blockchain would benefit the registration of micro-credentials, proofs of learning attested to a student. Micro-credentialing is hot in education innovation. First of all, the trend of being in control of your own data and European legislation via GDPR forces administrators to think twice about sharing and managing personal learning activities. Second, millenial students don’t fit in traditional education curriculae, learning for a continuous period of 3 to 6 years for a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree. Rather they mix and match learning modules from various education providers, preferably far abroad, afraid to be missing out on resume building opportunities. Last but not least, in today’s gig-econonomy employers seek fresh matching skills to their vacancies instead of outdated experience, evidenced by semi-lifelong employment. Let’s see if we can make blockchain work for these observations.
Privacy by Design
Organizations doing business in Europe face huge fines leaking personal data under their control as a consequence of GDPR. Fixation on data protection and personal data governance may lead to caution at best and total stagnation at worst when dealing with you as their customer. On the other hand, many are claiming your consent, but in fact letting you waive your data protection rights. Looking at you, Facebook. We need to think this over.
In these overhyped blockchain times, it’s easy to understand people are looking to the new kid on the block, no pun intended, to solve this wicked problem. But here’s the thing: blockchains are transparency machines by default. To preserve privacy and take advantage of decentralized characteristics we need to mix blockchain with identity governance. This can be addressed by self sovereign identity frameworks like Sovrin and uPort. The building blocks for verification and transparency of actions performed by or corresponding with your identity are provided by blockchain technology. How would we set this up?
Imagine someone, you, earning a micro-credential of having completed a course at some MOOC. You would like to share this achievement with a potential employer, whilst giving her a method to verify your achievement. With the uPort App, you can share this private data peer to peer, using your decentralized digital identity and the one of the employer. No private data is stored on-chain. But how would you go about doing the verification, bypassing a third party? We combine the transparency property of blockchain with the privacy aspect of self sovereign identity, by storing on-chain a hash with public data and off-chain private data input. In the uPort flow, the private data is shared amongst the parties involved. After merging this private data with the available public data, verification can be done by either party by off-chain hashing the data merger and comparing this to the stored hash on-chain.
Micro-credentials at work
In our micro-credentials case we use the OpenBadge standard to store public Issuer data, the issuer of the badge and public BadgeClass data, the content of the badge on-chain, but we don’t store the Recipient data, whom the badge is issued to, which obviously holds personal information. Instead, we use the uPort framework to attest this badge to a recipient from an issuer perspective. The recipient recieves this Attestation, a core entity of the OpenBadge standard, in her uPort wallet, which is kept under her control. Suppose I earn a Bachelor of Science degree at Stanford University; the uPort flow would be Stanford (the Issuer) attesting a BSc credential (the BadgeClass Bachelor of Science) to me (the Recipient). I receive a notification from Stanford of this attestation in my uPort App, and I can choose to accept or reject, in case you don’t want holding an attestation to the attendance at your friend’s bachelor party. Accepting means holding this attestation in my uPort wallet for further use as Proof of Credential, to be shared with interesting parties along the employer use case mentioned before.
Taking this one step further, the case for micro-credentials in the first place is to support a life-long learning experience. Now we have the opportunity to share and verify learning achievements directly without relying on some third party, and keeping our privacy. Building a verifiable reputation throughout our career. Earning a Bachelor or Master degree may give you a solid start, we have to keep learning and shaving our skills to stay competitive. Even more important, potential employers need fresh skills in a growing gig-economy. Instant verification of relevant experience means instant hiring, bypassing long running, outdated HR procedures. Speaking of which, students are hesitating to enroll in a 3 to 6 year diploma course, unsure if a) this knowledge is still required at the time they graduate and b) they need to invest a lot of time and money for a degree possibly worth little in a couple of years. Bottom line, things are moving fast and students are taking stock accordingly, you can imagine this having an enormous impact on the structuring of the education sector.
Our team has build a Proof of Concept to demonstrate the viability of a micro-credential marketplace, a sort of “verifiable LinkedIn”, where employers would post jobs and vacancies by means of credential requirements, giving job seekers the ability to anonymously upload their respective credentials, whereas the actual verification would be handled via a uPort peer to peer private flow.
Attestation of the Issuer
So we are able to verify attestations of micro-credentials to student recipients, how about verifying the trustworthiness of the issuing party? Gut feeling tells me a micro-credential issued by Stanford University has a slightly higher standing than, say, issued by the University of Zanzibar. In fact, we would like to verify the reputation of the educational institute in order to attest value to the credential issued. There are lots of reputation systems around for that kind of stuff, even blockchain oriented. However, most of them require some sort of rating system to be populated by the participants or stakeholders of the entity-to-be-rated, in this case the educational institute as the issuing party. These systems are susceptible to sybil attacks and gaming. Like inviting friends to give very good or bad rating.
Instead, let’s try to leverage blockchain to implement a more honest and verifiable reputation system. A setup of a Token Curated Registry (TCR) may be suitable for our use case. In fact, Mike Goldin’s excellent article tells us exactly what we’re looking for, regarding his college example. Common TCRs however build upon economic incentives by trading and valuing a token. By implementing scientific reputation schemes found in academia, we should be able to challenge candidate institute reputation by means of valuing published articles in scientific magazines or by ‘googlifying’ referenced authors associated with candidate institutes. This is still work in progress and I appreciate some pointers in that direction from the audience.
Conclusion
Decentralized micro-credentialing helps us building our self sovereign career path, onboarding the gig-economy and prevents us from investing in low value, time consuming course propositions. The education sector is facing disruption by the way we learn, consume courses and pay for credentialing. The success of MOOCs and the growing freelancer community should be early warning signs for the educational incumbents. Balancing blockchain with off-chain self sovereignty will help us keeping our privacy and complying with GDPR. In the end, we will all be part of a recursive reputation scheme: issuers attesting recipients attesting issuers etc..