Crafting credentials with code: Open-source built digital credentials for higher education

Digital credentials are at the forefront of higher education's evolution of lifetime learning and education. These credentials facilitate a learner-owned digital artifact of their educational achievements. With the latest implementations of digital credentials, programmatic implementation is non-trivial. From verifiable presentations to cryptographic signatures, it can be a daunting task to do it yourself for a project, website or experiment.
Enter the Digital Credentials Consortium based out of MIT, a collective of 14 institutions (and counting) charged with creating a trusted, distributed and shared infrastructure that will become the standard for issuing, storing, displaying and verifying academic credentials, digitally.
We'll introduce the ecosystem of digital credentials: W3C's Verifiable Credentials specification, 1EdTech's OpenBadges v3 specification and where the DCC's suite of microservices and applications fit in to the last-mile gap for implementation. We'll present recent efforts by the Georgia Institute of Technology in digital credentials issuance using this ecosystem, and how you can build the infrastructure that fits your needs to begin delivering digital credentials for your institution.
Finally, we'll focus on the future: the next iterations of DCC's open-source projects, the future consortium initiatives tackling big issues in higher education and setting the stage for where you (yes, you!) can contribute.
Eric Sembrat
Eric is the director of digital learning technologies for the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There, he spearheads the research and development at the cutting edge of instructional technology in higher education. He has over a decade of experience in higher education and leads the web development community-of-practice at the Institute.
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