 We have the information about the credential itself, not the information on the credential itself. By credential we mean sociology or all of that. So that has the name, the learning outcomes, the website, the mode of study, the grading scheme, EQF level, NQF level, rewarding body, accreditation, all the things we'd expected describe a learning unit. Now, one of the small but revolutionary changes in terms of changing the system is we changed one field here. It has a number of ECTS. Now, because ECTS is a system designed exclusively for higher education, we didn't want to say the whole world should use ECTS. So instead what we did was it's associated with credit system. And you can say there is no credit system and it's only 20 hours of workload. You can say we use ECTS, you can describe ECVET. You can say listen, we use Microsoft Learning Units, lynda.comhours. You can describe any type of modularity that is supported by the credential. And that is one of the ways of opening it up for any kind of learning. We also then link it to evidence, so that we're fully compatible with open badges, and we link it then to the information of the holder, which is the name, the date of birth of the holder, but also the grades they achieved in the particular credential. And again, grades, while isn't included in the original qualification standard from this scope, but we felt that grades were super important. And again, we made out, this is a simplified one. There's another one that comes out here for grades. And again, you can say the credential is a degree, in which case the grades might be distinction, honors, or standard. Or it could be marking on a curve from 0 to 100, or it could be ADC. And again, we don't care what the grading system is, we let you describe it. There's one other, that solves one problem. But the second problem we're looking at credentials, one of the things which has bugged us, essentially, is why does this sort of metadata only exist at degrees? And honestly, why does a diploma supplement exist at all? What you interact with in universities presents. You do courses, you do exams for courses, you get grades and results for courses. And you see the missing route information system. So effectively you're being awarded credentials for those credits. So, this again is a very, very simple, but very, very powerful idea. We added a relational field. A simple relational field. A credential can be composed of another credential. Technically, it's the simplest thing in the world. But because a credential can be of type credit, or of type degree, or of type learning hour, or of type anything else, we can take a credit type credential and effectively stack it with others and convert it into a diploma type credential. If you do this, from a technical perspective, the need for diploma supplement gone, because the degree is made up, it's physically made up of its component credits. So, in terms of a metadata standard, what we are attempting to do here is actually create a metadata standard that can capture any unit of learning, informal, non-formal, formal, informal as validational, informal, but any unit of learning, higher education, vocational, compulsory, non-compulsory, professional, with the same set of fields. We're just starting to test extensively, and we're trying to just throw the most exotic types of learning we captive to see if it survives the really weird ones. But so far, it's hoping up quite well. I'm not going to go into metadata fields field by field, but if any of you are metadata geeks or recognition geeks, we've actually got this entire thing on the top for public consultation and I'll have you share the link with you afterwards. But we decided not to stop with the IDR standard. We said, why don't we actually try and build this? Now, to be very, very clear, we are not trying to build a production system. We're not trying to build an alpha production system. We're trying, what we are doing is we're building what's called a minimum viable product. We want to take these concepts we've been talking about and try and apply them in a software product that works. But what we're trying to do is build a proof of concept. If we build a proof of concept and publish that code, then bigger projects or other actors can take it up and implement it. So it's still very much a research-based thing, even if we're developing. Now, we said that we're actually going to create a model blockchain infrastructure for storing and automatically verifying potentials. Now, just so I get the idea of the room, how many of you actually know what blockchain is? One, two, okay, so very, very, very fast idea to blockchain. Why use a blockchain? Because I'm from Malta and we call Malta the blockchain island, so they're cool. Other reasons for using a blockchain is that blockchains are effectively decentralized leaders. So, very, very short knowledge of blockchain. A traditional database has to be stored in a centralized server. That server has to be controlled by somebody. The person who controls that database has power over that database and can become very rich and very powerful. If you want an example of this, think of Mastercard. What does Mastercard actually do? All Mastercard actually do is keep a big database with a list of who transfers money to them. And they keep it very safe and you can rely on it. And then they give you access cards for that database. But that's all they really do. Every time you swipe a card, they add one line to their database. For that simple service, they charge about 3% of the value of the entire transaction to record one line securely. So that's the power of centralization. If we were to build a European database of credentials between every university in Europe, you would hit governance issues straight away. But who's actually going to control the database? Who's going to run it? Is it going to be a foundation? Is it going to be a company? Are we going to pay fees to? What are we going to do about personal data in it? It becomes a nightmare instantly. Technically it's been possible to do this for decades. Blockchain is a slightly different technology. Effectively, what happens is instead of storing the database on one server, every person who's using it keeps an entire copy of the entire database on their machine. Every time you try and add something to the version of your machine, it's synchronized to the others. But it's only synchronized to the others if the other machine is approved. So what you have is a system that has no one person controlling it. It's controlled in a kind of direct democracy by its users. The other thing you need to know about blockchain is because there's a copy of each computer, scale this up to 1,000 to 2,000 computers, it's basically, I'm not going to say completely impossible, but it's essentially impossible to delete or hack. Because they're deleted, I'll have to delete every copy of everyone's computer and to hack it, I'll actually have to hack all thousand copies, not just the one on my computer. So it makes it very, very, very, very difficult to hack blockchain networks. There are also other types of cryptography in, but let's say you start getting into these, it's as likely as the number of stars in the universe type of numbers. So why didn't we want to experiment with blockchain? First of all, I mentioned to you that it's a young technology. So blockchain is supposed to be tamper-proof. They should allow for revocability. They should allow for user-held credentials and they should allow for independently verifiable credentials. One of the reasons we're playing is that all of this is theoretical. They need to be built. And there's two ways of doing this. I'm going to go through these slides quite quickly because if you're not blockchain experts, you won't necessarily be interested in them. But the typical mechanism that's being proposed so far for blockchain credentials is something called hashing. So you don't actually store the credential on a blockchain. You just store the hash of the credential on a blockchain, which basically means you hold the credential, PDF or so on. And on the blockchain, there's just the digital signature that allows you to verify the proof that that is real. So you have the certificate and when you check that certificate against a hash on a blockchain, you can tell if it's true or not. So what we're experimenting with is a slightly different and more radical approach. We're saying, why just store the hash on a blockchain? Let's store the entire credential on a blockchain using something called an Ethereum 7.1 on the phone. Looking up if you want. So we want to store the basic claim. The University of Volta awarded Anthony Camilleri one degree in law on this date. The rest of the information we store off-chain because blockchain has size limitations, but we want to store that statement, the essential statement of the award directly on the chain. That has some advantage. The credential itself is stored on a chain, which means that credential becomes permanent. Once you put it on the chain, that credential essentially exists forever and it's unadulterable and unhackable. If any person wishes to claim the authenticity, not only to contact the University and wait 15 days for a verified credential or so on, you just check the chain and if it's on the chain, it's real. Because again, remember, the chain is essentially unhackable. In 30 years there's going to be a video of me saying this is unhackable and it will be. But at the moment it is the most secure video system there is. So what we're saying is that the reason we want to use a blockchain as well is to make them immutable, which is a technical term that basically means undelutable and unhackable. And the future... I don't like Joe Najem. It's a future with recognition where we don't have entire state agencies whose only job is like checking whether credentials are valid or not so employers can read them where we have entire HR departments whose job is to verify credentials. But where recognition is universal, it's automatic and it's seamless. Where you go into a job interview, they say, ah, you're Anthony, you tap your phone. OK, yes, you qualify as continue with the interview. That's as easy as it should be. We're very far from that, but that's the ideas we are playing with. And to link it back to the beginning of my presentation, the context for all of this is that if we talk about open educational resources, open educational practices, what we're trying to do is add the last phase to it, the output part of it, open educational credentials. And for us, that is the third missing pillar of the open education ecosystem. So, enough theory for the moment. We did tell you that we were playing with software. We don't have any working software at this point, but we do have a working one. Just to show you some of the ideas we're playing with. Now, when you look at the software, it's remarkably simple, actually. Let me just change to a more usable screen format. So, this is the illustration view. So, this is the idea of what a simple interface will look like. Now, by the way, this interface looks intentionally like any simple credential interface. Now, there's a couple of things you notice, though. First of all, you see smart contracts management, because everything here is being built as smart contracts directly under the theory of blockchain. And you also see weird things like this, which are blockchain wallet addresses. I'm only showing you those to show that there's blockchain behind it. But blockchain behind it just tells you it'll exist forever and it's under a couple. You as a user don't need to worry about this. You should never see the blockchain part of it. And the other thing I should tell you before leading you through this is that this is a mock-up for a minimum viable product, which means we are just proving the concept that this can work and can be built on a blockchain, but there's a lot of features which we leave out because it's a very small development budget and it's a proof of concept. So, for example, we don't build a login and a permission system. Of course you would need a login and a permission system if you deploy this, but it's not necessarily for a proof of concept. Login systems work, we know that. So, the types of smart contracts we need to develop is that you need to be able to register an institution in the system, you need to be able to register a course in the system, and you need to be able to register in the system. But you click on institutions, institutions, and you have very basic information like institutions. Now, one of the interesting things is the way we imagine this being used is that the create institution field would actually be given permissions through accreditation. So, instead of actually issuing an accreditation certificate, you would just give them access through the national certificate platform, for example, and give them the power to issue digitally certified credentials in the national system. So, basically, you give them the power to issue official digital qualifications with the associated wallet address. So, instead of a certificate, you would actually just give them a wallet address that allows them to issue accredited qualifications, and that would be a digital concept of accreditation. So, again, from a metadata point of view, it's just one line, but it's a very, very powerful concept, because then you can use this wallet to issue qualifications, and basically, if you don't have an approved wallet address, that is clearly a credential for the diploma. So, it gives you a very, very simple way of doing this. If you look at the list of courses, you see that list of courses are simple enough to deploy a new course, and you have all the metadata we were talking about before. The learning outcomes, the identifier, title, et cetera, nothing particularly special in the course. And if you were to deploy a degree, you would find a very simple list of degrees and the metadata unit for a degree. So, that's simple enough stuff. As an institution, what do you want to do? You want to add participants, you want to add courses, maybe you want to add other types of credentials. To add a course, you click on course, I go to computer science, and I issue a new credential to the student that meets it. I have a link to the metadata at the top, and I have the date, the grade, the URL to evidence, and I can generate a claim. So, as I generate a claim, a transaction is registered on the blockchain that secures science data for it. Again, registering such a particular blockchain is kind of cool, but it's not a concept that's going to change the world. The real power of the system comes and what can you do once you have those courses in the world. So, this looks very much like an open-ledged wallet. The open-ledged wallet is pretty good.