Sharing Verifiable Digital Credentials

[e0d]

Abstract

Learner ownership of digitally verifiable and shareable assertions of attainment -- credentials -- is aligned with goals of learner-centricity and open platforms. The Open edX platform has existing mechanisms for sharing Open edX credentials, however, they do not support recent innovations around distributed ledgers. Both the EU and the W3C have been focused on development standards for shareable, verifiable credentials based on distributed ledgers. Credentials are connected to a self-sovereign digital identity and can be shared and independently varied to support processes like applying to degree programs, applying for employment, etc.

The Initiative proposes to

• Create a generalized mechanism for sharing Open edX credentials
• Migrate existing implementations to that mechanism or deprecate them if they are not valuable
• Create a reference implementation for the integration mechanism with the one or more credential stores based on distributed ledgers including the DCC/W3C wallet and/or the EU wallet.

Project-level metrics:

Impact: Increase the value of attainments achieved on the Open edX platform by allowing learners to present them in order to prove their attainment.
Measure: Deployment of reference implementation to Open edX instances, enablement of the feature, use by learners

Context & Background

TBW

Scope & Approach

TBW

Value & Impact

TBW

Milestones and/or Epics

• General Design for Sharing Open edX Credentials #1735
• Implementation of the General Design for Sharing Open edX Credentials #1728
• Open Badges 3.0: Support for external credential sharing #1737
• EU Digital Credentials Integration #1732
• Digital Credentials Consortium Integration #1731

Named Release

unknown

Timeline

Proposed By

tCRIL

Additional Info

No response

Issue for the Overall initiative

[github-actions]

Thanks for your submission, @openedx/open-edx-project-managers will review shortly.

[DeanJayMathew]

Nice one!

[hurtstotouchfire]

FYI, @gabew1984 at 2U is picking up rethinking some of the UX for program records and credential sharing is also in the mix for that.

[mariajgrimaldi]

Hi there, folks. Do you know who we should reach out to have an overall update on the progress of this initiative? Thanks!

[abartov]

I join @mariajgrimaldi's question. I have been looking at a number of tickets related to badging and DCC, but am unable to determine the current status of support, nor what the "shipped in Olive" #1737 ticket means in practice. Can anyone shed light?

[e0d]

@mariajgrimaldi sorry for missing your query originally. And alerting @abartov. I'm probably the best person and we are doing some follow on work just now.

In olive we shipped the ability to share program credentials to the DCC wallet app and OBv3 supporting wallets from the credentials service. We've recently discovered that an upgrade of the DCC app is having issues and are looking into that now.

Since then an integration to Credly for courses and other badges has been introduced.

Currently we are working on some backend refactoring to make badge support more general and adding an integration with Accredible.

I'd love to know more about the use cases you are looking to support.

[abartov]

Thanks very much for the quick response, @e0d !

I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, and we are using Open edX to offer free courses to Wikimedia volunteers. We are looking for an open solution for verifiable credentials that does not involve a commercial service, so that volunteers completing programs on our LMS can present those credentials at both Wikimedia and non-Wikimedia contexts, without a cost to them or requiring any proprietary software.

[e0d]

Thanks for the context. Are you planning to use the DCC wallet? We will be looking into what's causing the issue after upgrade. If not, it would be helpful to know what wallets you are exploring so we can consider them for support.

[abartov]

We would like to, but we are concerned about its support for less-than-cutting-edge devices. We have learners all over the world, and many only own one device, often more than three or four years old.

Is there any other supported client that could be used to obtain verifiable digital credentials from current or upcoming Open edX, or is DCC the state of the art at the moment?

[e0d]

I would think the DCC would work on a broad array of devices, have you seen otherwise? I can also reach out to the DCC team for their take and also thoughts about other viable candidates.

[abartov]

Yes, I have seen it refuse to install on an Android 10 device.

[alexfigtree]

@e0d The DCC Learner Credential Wallet is currently the only open source and production-ready educational wallet hosted at the Open Wallet Foundation, however, there are other wallets you can reference on their site.

@abartov We've updated the wallet to allow it to install on older Android operating systems. Please feel free to try downloading on Android 10 or later by going here. If you run into any issues, feel free to open a ticket on our repository.

If either one of you would like to hear more about the DCC's work and how our wallet can work with Open edX, please feel free to reach out directly.

Also, feel free to subscribe to our mailing list for updates: https://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/dcc-software-support/