Digitalization of education

The photograph shows the diplomas of a dentist and a dentist from the late 19th century.

More than 100 years have passed. The diplomas of most organizations to this day do not differ from those issued in the 19th century. It would seem that since everything is working so well, why change something? However, not everything works well. Paper certificates and diplomas have serious shortcomings due to which time and money are wasted:

• Paper diplomas are long and expensive to produce. You need to spend money on their design, special paper, printing and mailing.
• A paper diploma is easy to fake. If you make it difficult to forge by adding watermarks and other protection methods, then the price of creation increases greatly.
• Information about issued paper diplomas needs to be stored somewhere. If the registry, which stores information about issued documents, is hacked, it will no longer be possible to verify their authenticity. Well, sometimes databases get hacked.
• Certificate authentication requests are processed manually. As a result, the process drags on for weeks.

Some organizations are addressing these issues by issuing digital documents. They can be of the following types:

1. Scans and photographs of paper documents.
2. PDF certificates.
3. Digital certificates of various types.
4. Digital certificates issued on a single standard.

Let's analyze each type in more detail.

Scans and photographs of paper documents

Although they can be stored on a computer and quickly sent to other people, all the same, to create them, you must first release paper ones, which does not solve the problems listed.

PDF certificates

Unlike paper ones, they are already much cheaper to produce. You no longer need to spend money on paper and trips to the printing house. However, they are also easy to change and fake. Somehow I even did it myself 🙂

Digital certificates of various types

For example, certificates issued by GoPractice:

Such digital certificates already solve most of the problems described above. They are cheaper to issue and harder to counterfeit because they are stored on the organization's domain. They can also be shared on social networks, which attracts new customers.

However, each organization issues its own type of diploma, which are not integrated with each other. Therefore, in order to demonstrate their skills, people have to attach a bunch of links and a folder with pictures to their resumes. From this it is difficult to understand what exactly a person can do. Now the resume does not demonstrate real competencies. 10,000 product management course takers have the same certification but different knowledge

Digital certificates issued on a single standard

There are currently two such standards: Open Badges and Verifiable Credentials.

In 2011, the Mozilla Foundation introduced the Open Badges standard. The idea behind it is to combine any curriculum, course and lesson available on the Internet with an open standard that is issued to participants at the end of the course.

Verifiable credentials are an open source standard that is being prepared for adoption by the W3C (the consortium that governs standards on the internet). Already now, diplomas from Harvard, MIT, IBM and others are issued on it.

Digital certificates issued on a single standard are better than analogues in the following:

• They are completely electronic: they cannot be damaged, torn, lost or forgotten on the bus.
• They are programmable: a certificate can be revoked, renewed, auto-renewal logic or a limit on the number of uses can be set, a certificate can be supplemented and changed during its lifetime, and may depend on other certificates or events.
• 100% user controlled. Data from a digital certificate cannot be leaked during the next hack of Sberbank or Sony, it is not stored in public registries and poorly protected data centers.
• Much harder to fake. The security of public cryptography is auditable and known, and when was the last time you verified the authenticity of a signature or seal? Have you checked at least once in your life?
• Certificates issued on this standard can be written to the blockchain. So even if the issuing organization ceases to exist, diplomas will be available.
• They can be shared on social networks, which will provide new customers. And all statistics about views and reposts can be collected.

The principle of operation of digital certificates can be represented as follows:

Over time, when more and more organizations switch to a single standard, it will be possible to create a digital competency profile, where all certificates and diplomas received by a person will be displayed. This will allow you to create personalized training, selecting the courses necessary for a particular person. It will also reduce the time for selection of employees, as HR specialists will be able to automatically check whether a person has the necessary skills, without checking whether the person wrote the truth in the resume.

In subsequent articles, we will tell you more about the technology and specific cases of its application.

Source: habr.com