Thursday, August 30, 2018

Blockchain for Microcredentials

Greetings from the Australian Computer Society (ACS) in Sydney. I am a member of the ACS Blockchain Technical committee and taking part in a workshop with people from industry and academia. We were looking for use cases, so I suggested education, specifically blockchain for micro-credentials.

Educational qualifications much shorter than current diplomas and degrees is a hot topic in Australian vocational and higher education. What takes this beyond a theoretical discussion is New Zealand recognizing Micro-credentials from 22 August 2018.

A NZ micro-credential is equivalent to about 1 to 8 weeks study. So in addition to accumulating perhaps a half dozen macro-credentials during their career, an individual may have hundreds of micro-credentials. It would be cumbersome to manage these on paper, or through a centralized computer system.

The micro-credentials may then be automatically checked for some jobs by automated systems. I will touch on this in my talk on mobile education for the Computer Society of Sri Lanka  National IT Conference (NITC 2018),  2 to 4 October. Students could study and be tested via their mobile device and then their digital certificate provided via the same device. 

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