Innovations in Open Badges & Blockchain

October 26th, 2017 | Kerri Lemoie

BadgeChain began as an investigation into blockchain in the context of Open Badges, a new digital credential designed to acknowledge learning and achievements that happen anytime, anywhere, and anyhow. Open Badges embed metadata describing an accomplishment into an image (or badge), this construct results in easily consumable data and ultimately a truly portable credential. Badges can be microcredentials but also any type of credential including degrees and certifications.

Open Badges are hosted on web servers, and the verification method is reliant on the issuers storing the data for as long as the earners need it. But web servers can go down and the data stored could be modified without any historical reference. Two inherent qualities of blockchain technologies address this: permanence (at least for as long as there are nodes in the chain) and immutability (once a transaction is on the chain, it can’t be changed).

This week we caught up with two initiatives that embrace the ethos of Open Badges and seek to improve upon data verifiability using blockchain technologies: Blockcerts and OpenBlockchain.

Blockcerts is “an open standard for building apps that issue and verify blockchain-based official records” including academic credentials and professional licenses with data aligning to the Open Badges specification. Blockcert’s open source libraries, tools, and mobile apps were initially developed by MIT’s Media Lab and Learning Machine and they are encouraging community involvement through their community forum and GitHub repo.

A recent example of Blockcerts in action is MIT’s Digital Diploma which makes it possible for students to share their verifiable and tamper-proof diploma digitally. Some other examples coming out of Learning Machine include the Federation of State Medical Boards which is using Blockcerts to verify medical qualifications, and the Republic of Malta aimed at workforce training credentials.

OpenBlockchain is an initiative of the Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) at The Open University in the UK. KMI’s experiments are primarily aimed at higher education institutions in the UK, but they are also working on projects concerning workforce training, peer-to-peer interactions, and the funding of education through blockchain. They are taking a unique approach to Open Badges by experimenting with ways to store and issue them using ethereum. Ethereum, originally built based on the Bitcoin blockchain, is also decentralized, meaning that distribution is amongst many nodes, but instead of just storing transactions, the nodes also host and run small apps (called DApps) which rely on logic and data stored in smart contracts.

One of OpenBlockchain’s first experiments converted Open Badges earned on the OpenLearn platform into smart contracts that display the information about the credential on blockchain. The evidence and feedback provided in each achievement are also stored on blockchain. They envision a UK-wide blockchain where all students’ credentials are stored so as to facilitate credit transfer and allow potential employers to view student work. Currently, the KMI team is working on a Moodle plugin that will issue Moodle Badges to smart contracts. A video demonstrating this as well as other informational videos about their work may be found here: https://blockchain.open.ac.uk/#demos.

BadgeChain Newsletter #10 – Getting Acquainted with Encryption and Blockchain

July 27th, 2017 | Carla Casilli and Kerri Lemoie

The web is built on trust. We trust that our credit card numbers won’t get stolen when we buy things. We trust that the website or app where we enter personal data is what it claims to be. A site’s brand or reputation may create a sense of security but it’s actually a tool—encryption—that makes things safe.

Encryption is a type of cryptography that uses math to encode information. It is a highly useful and dynamic tool that ranges from limiting who has access to content to proving identity. When we see green padlocks on our browser address bar or https:// in the url, it demonstrates that a digital certificate has been installed proving that the website’s identity has been verified and also that the data is encrypted until that very website receives it. Nearly every website that collects data uses (or should use) encryption. But what does this have to do with blockchain and why does it matter that we understand it?

Encryption is often based on a system of public and private key pairs – also referred to as asymmetric keys. The keys are long alphanumeric strings that are mathematically related. Aptly named, the public key is available publicly, where the private key is intended to be kept confidential by its owner and entities the owner trusts. Since the public and private keys are related, if information is encrypted with the public key, its private key is the only one that can decrypt it.

Blockchains use encryption to prove the ownership of data. They can also use encryption to provide security and privacy. On public blockchains, like Bitcoin, encrypted data can be embedded as part of the transaction. As increasing numbers of blockchain based applications come to market, key management will become a critical aspect for adoption. Key owners are responsible for their secure storage because if a private key is lost, the proof of ownership and access to the related data is lost too.

Blockcerts.org is an example of an initiative that encrypts digital credentials and issues them as certificates on the Bitcoin blockchain. The recipient of the digital credential is provided a private key by the credential issuer. The key is necessary to decrypt the credential and share it with others. In an instance like this, a lost private key could mean lost access to the digital credential. In the world of fintech, the same principle works for Bitcoin, too, which are currently valued at 2577.80 USD. It’s painful to imagine the impact a lost hard drive could have on one’s wallet.

Happily, for those absent minded of us, application developers are working to create interfaces that assist with key management, and there are projects underway that may make it possible to recover lost keys. In the meantime, work on your memory palace and appreciate the value and impact of encryption because the future is looking increasingly blockchain-based.

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Here are the articles that inspired and informed this newsletter. We recommend them to you as interesting data points in your consideration of education and decentralized technologies.