DigitalCredentials
Consortium
Kim Hamilton Duffy, MITMatt Lisle, Georgia Tech
Brandon Muramatsu, MITDigital Credentials Consortium
MissionOur mission is to create a trusted,
distributed, and sharedinfrastructure that will become thestandard for issuing, storing,
displaying, and verifying academic
credentials, digitally.

Get the whitepaper: bit.ly/DCCWhitepaper
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DCC Founding Members
Delft University of Technology (TheNetherlands)
Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)Harvard University (USA)Tecnológico De Monterrey (Mexico)
Technical University of Munich (Germany)
University of California at Berkeley (USA)
University of California, Irvine (USA)

Hasso Plattner Institute, University ofPotsdam (Germany)

University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)

University of Toronto (Canada)

McMaster University (Canada)

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DCC Guiding Principles
Learners●●●●

Learners retain primary control
over their credentials.
Learners’ consent is required forissuance of digital credentials
Learners decide to whom they grant
access.
Barriers to receiving and managing
credentials are minimal to enablebroad participation.

Issuers●●●

Issuers control to whom they issue
credentials, the particularachievement that the credential
represents, and which credential
options are available to the learner.
Issuers can revoke credentials
according to their institution’spolicies.
Barriers to issuing credentials areminimal to enable broad anddiverse participation.

Trust: Everyone is able to review how the infrastructure and processes work.
● Trust in the integrity of the credentials is established cryptographically.
● Credentials can be verified without consulting the original issuer

6Verifiable Credentials Ecosystem“College / University”“Registrar”“Learner”
In a “Wallet”“Employer”“Graduate School”“National Organization”

A DCC-compatible Credential is a W3C Verifiable Credential (tamper-evident credential where the authorship8
can be cryptographically verified) that meets the technical and policy specifications adopted by the DCC.

MIT xPRO Pilot

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MIT xPROMIT xPRO offers online professional education programs designed to help
working professionals build their skills on the job.
Programs and courses include:●●●●

Systems Engineering
Quantum Computing
Leadership Principles for Scientists, Engineers and Researchers
Big Data, Additive Manufacturing, Machine Learning

Issues course and program certificates.
~50,000 learners, 94% of whom earned certificates.
10Highlights●●Learner imports into wallet on completion of course/program
Uses Verifiable Credentials and schema.org EOCred types

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MIT and U.S. Department ofEducation Digital
Credential Project12MIT-ED Digital Credential ProjectGoals●

U.S. Department of Education contract to MIT to develop an open
Student Wallet draft standard and implementation○●

MIT’s work builds on DCC activities and is a reference implementation ofthem

Deliverables○○○

Open Source (Draft) Standard for Student Wallet (March 2021)
Reference Implementation of the Open Standard (April 2021)
2-3 higher education pilots (“deployments”), support, and analysis (MaySeptember 2021)

To March 2021

April to August 2021

Sep 2021

Identify
PilotsMIT Team Works with Pilots

Reportto ED
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Current Status●●●●

Deployment to app stores imminentCore flows to request/receive with proof-ofcontrol identifier
Contributing to Universal Wallet Interop
Specification and Reference Implementation
Compatibility with a Broad Range of Digital
Wallets

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Georgia TechLMS Issuer (LTI)

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LMS Issuer●

Shout out to Stuart Freeman!
○●●

GitHub repos: cred-admin and lti-issuer
IMS Global:
○
○

●
●
●

… and front-end support from Chris Yang!

lti-issuer adheres to the LTI standard
Credentials are Open Badges wrapped in VC

Leverages past work building a Blockcerts Admin application
Upcoming pilots will also use the Open Source Wallet
UX research (Shout out to Sonam Singh):○○

Fall 2020 - conducted interviews with faculty and students using wireframes
Spring 2021 - usability tests with an MVP

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W3C
Verifiable Credentialsfor Education

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About the W3C CCG●
●Standards Incubation
Broader charter, draft standards, but not SDO○○●

Create draft standards and work with SDOs that can help bring the specs tomaturity
Solidify with reference implementations, use cases

Responsible for○○○○Verifiable Credentials
Decentralized Identifiers
Universal Wallet Interop SpecAnd more

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W3C CCG VC-EDU Approach●Focus:
○

○
○
○

●

Use of Verifiable Credentials andrelated standards in educational usecases
Bridge to existing educational (andworkforce) data standards
Conceptual alignment
How decentralized identity methods
can be used with existing standards
and systems

Standards ClassApproach

Standards we areConsidering

VC in Education
Standards

Provide baseline interoperable standard
for VC-Ed; ideally other VC-Ed standards
should be extensions of this.

● Europass

Cause minimum disruption to existinglarge-scale implementations.
Credential SystemStandards

Allow for these standards to besemantically interoperable with VCEdstandards.

●●●●

Vocabulary Standards

Use existing vocabularies from thesestandards if and when they are suitablefor purpose.

● CTDL● schema.org● Europass CodeLists

Best Practices /Principles StandardsUse these to inform our approach in linewith best practices and possibly enrichbest practice.

● ILR/LER Wrapper

Current work items○○VC-EDU Use Cases
VC-EDU Models

IMS Open Badges
PESC
CLR
HROpen26

Questions?

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Backup28

Envelope/Payload29