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Learning Machine and MIT Media Lab’s Learning Initiative have just rolled out the first version of an open-source project that builds an ecosystem for creating, sharing, and verifying Blockchain-based educational credentials.
These certificates can be collected by individuals and shared directly with anyone who requires official documents. It’s as simple as sending a link.
The Bitcoin Blockchain is currently being used as the secure anchor of trust to ensure that each certificate is authentic, unchanged, and still valid.
Subsequent releases will make it more useful for real-world adoption: certificate versioning, revocation, cohort issuance, cost reduction, and privacy considerations for encrypting documents that contain highly private information, like academic transcripts.
Chris Jagers , Co-Founder and CEO of Learning Machine, explained: “The goal of our collaboration with the MIT Media Lab is to empower individuals with shareable credentials that can be used peer-to-peer and verified as authentic. The current system for sharing official records is slow, complicated, expensive, and broken for everyone in a myriad of ways. The first generation of students to grow up entirely during the Internet age have started applying for college, and many admissions officers can share stories about applicants trying to text photos of their academic records. The expectation, while seemingly humorous, conveys an honest impression about the way things should work. It should be that easy for people to share certified records directly with others and have them trusted as authentic.” “Blockchain verification flips the current power arrangement in higher education by giving learners control over their official documents,” said Learning Machine President and COO, Dan Hughes . “Today, most evidence of achievement is bottled up in a proprietary information system or stored unofficially on a piece of paper framed on a wall or lost in a box in the garage. Jailbreaking the credential is about […]
