 the same parties are involved in signing it. So something is happening here and the interesting thing is this is what's happening in credentials. You're having all the alternative providers writing the same kinds of statements but writing them in different ways that may or may not affect their recognition. So what we wanted to dive into was really what this means and what we found is that we have to look into first of all the quality of the statement. So what stands behind the quality of what's written in the credential and secondly the quality of the media. And by the quality of the media you remember we defined the credential as a documented statement. So quality of the statement and quality of the document is written. And what we found is that there are five elements of quality that can apply to each tool. Distictiveness, authenticity, accessibility, exchangeability and portability. Don't worry I won't leave you with the key words. So let's talk about distinctiveness first of all. Distinctiveness is something which I'd say has been referred to quite a bit by things. So if we think of the quality of the statement what do we mean when we say the statement has to be distinctive? It means it has to represent a specific identifiable and measurable experienced skill or fact. So I have to identify the specific learning that took place and have to identify the specific person that holds that credential. Nothing particularly well shattering there. The quality of the medium means that the medium needs to allow for the storage and display of the statement as well as any and all associated. And then we already start coming to some differences. So your traditional degree was not able to hold a lot of data. So they invented a diploma cycle to go with it. Digital degree can hold a very limited amount of data if you choose to and it can even do some structured namespaces and so on. The next part we come to is authenticity. And authenticity is a big concern, big business at its institutions. And what we're talking about authenticity is basically is the certificate secure and is the certificate verifiable. When you break down those concepts though it means that the statement needs to contain enough information to verify first of all when, where and by whom it was issued. Because if you know where, when and by whom it was issued then you can go back and say verify that the transaction took place at that time. You also want to be able ideally to trace and reproduce the conditions under which it was issued. What do we mean by this? The typical example is in these scandals we'll be hearing around Europe about various ministers who plagiarized their degrees. When there is a claim about it the evidence still exists. You can go back, you can actually check that degree again and you can reproduce the process that leads to the issue of the credential. So because the evidence was there we could continue to verify the authenticity even of the process. And there should be a time limit. You should have the ability to issue the credential for a limited time. This is typical with professional certifications for example and just as an example of the degree it should be possible to revoke it if for some reason it is invalid. Now if you look in the medium there are quality aspects of the medium that allow it to move. First of all it should only allow an issuer to create a certificate. Now there's all sorts of tricks that have been used for that over the years. I mean special types of papers, special seals, special stamps. In digital it's easy to just use a PKI key which only the issuer has and that way only the issuer can issue a certain type of credential. It should ideally be tamper proof and edit proof. It's arguable whether anything is truly tamper proof but the higher the more tamper proof it is the better quality it has. You should be able to store or link to the information required to verify all of this preferably automatically. And this is an important one for usability. For the media the medium itself should be able to display its validity. So if I have you know one of the typical security paper holographic whatever whatever degrees if I try to edit that it's going to be immediately visible that I've tried to mess with it. If I do the same on a digital document if it fails any of the validation checks or if some of these tried to tamper with the ideal issue or the medium itself should be able to give me a big red mark that this is invalid. If I'm able to do that the credential is in itself more valuable. Accessibility is something which is straightforward widely spoken language in terms of the statement or easy to read graphical format, open badges philosophy. In terms of the medium interoperable medium and a widely used and or open format. Now the interesting thing about paper for example is that paper is 100% interoperable everywhere except paper. But on the other hand the white leaves an open format that depends on how you're at it. On the other hand if you look digital interoperability is more of a challenge because just you have one doesn't mean somebody else can read it. So even those digital can make things a lot more automated. They doesn't necessarily make it more interoperable. Exchangeability is a big one. A lot of effort has been put into ECTS, modules, so on and so forth. And when we looked at it from a quality perspective, an argument was that if you build a credential to be modular and modular means you can divide it into smaller parts or you can put smaller parts together to make bigger ones. The more modular it is, then you have to find different ways for different purposes, which means you can use the same credential for more use cases. And if the purpose is recognition, you remember the equation at the beginning, then it also instantly becomes higher quality. So in terms of quality of the statement, we talk about being one dealer and we also say that you should convert to a whole range of other types of credentials. Typical example here, you can convert 180 ECTS into a degree. You have 180 credentials of one type and you've converted them into one of another type. It increases usability. For the medium, this means ideally you should be able to create relational links by the medium. In paper, that might be just putting all your credits on the file. Digitally, you can do it better here probably. And it means that it should, the tech, should allow you to do this conversion process. And finally, portability. Now, we are using portability a little bit different than, say, the bottleneck. By portability, we literally need to put it in your pocket to carry it around. Quality of the statement is the statement document owned by you. You will know GDPR, your own, your personal data, et cetera, et cetera. But there are still universities in Europe who they keep the only original copy of your certificate and they will only give you certified copies. So are you holding in control of your data or aren't you? And I think we can all agree that your grades are as personally identifiable as it gets. Quality of the medium, it means that the medium should allow for the user to physically possess the credential in a place of their choosing. So the quality element, again, if you get it on paper and see if you have it, you can store it in your safe or under your bed or put it on your wall or whatever. Digital, though, if I only make your credential available in my university cloud and you're not allowed to download it, then am I really physically possessing my credential? And also, from a usability perspective, as the shareability might be. You put all of this together and you get an idea of, let's say, the complexity of credentials. And all of this is not just clear at the core of the problem. So what we taught you about, we can control quality principles and criteria. Quality principles and criteria can be used to build standards. And once you have those, then it makes sense to actually start building tech for this. In terms of why are we so interested in tech, it's very simple. The EU is building it right now. So part of the digital education plan is actually an European framework for digital credentials. And it's very easy to say, we're going to build a framework for digital-ficy credentials. But our postulation is that that framework will have to take this level of complexity into account to actually serve the real purposes that are needed by education. And the other thing is that if you look at all of this, a lot of you are going to be saying, my university has said probably most of the things we said in the statement. And at least half of the stuff we talked about quality of the medium. Why are you talking about this? Why do you need this? And the answer I would give you is, this isn't so much for the university, but it's for all the alternative potential providers. One of the stories we talked about, for example, modularity. MOOCs started as completely non-formal, no certificates of any kind, etc. And they slowly gained more and more of these quality criteria. They got more formal assessments, they got more formal certificates, they got identity verification before you do the exam. They've now started doing nano degrees where they modularized them. And so somehow they're actually building onto this and enhancing the quality of the criteria that attached to it. Such as some extent, we're hoping that this will form the framework of a roadmap of where we want to go, both in terms of standards and in terms of the tech. So I'll stop there for the moment. And first of all, do you have any questions? I'd be happy to answer any questions. And then afterwards, we have a little bit of work to make to help you understand the concepts. When you're talking about availability, we often, we are users of the platforms where we put some credentials like digital badges, so we depend on them. Sometimes they do not work like open badges, you know, so we can preview and have a badge or something. So how to make it happen that we do not depend so much on the platforms because they can be here today and not tomorrow. What can we do with our credentials? Well, I have a whole bunch of answers for you, depending on who you ask. We'll look at what approach for it this afternoon before we're filming ourselves. But if you look at the landscape, GDPR tells you you have to now include export of all your data. So all these platforms basically have to buy your, I know certainly they have to do it, but by your vision, they basically go and download all of them. Secondly, when we talk about portability of credentials, you can think of something as a digitally signed PDF, a digitally signed PDF has the verification and security inbuilt into the document itself and is self-verifiable. If you want to look at some fancy solutions people are doing, there are people, there are these three different companies who are actually doing this on the watchdog so that you can have like independently verifiable decentralized blockchain credential networks. So there is a few ways to do it, but it isn't very useful for if you're a company because honestly, I don't need a online platform to store my credentials and send them to my employer. As soon as you take this away from them, it really misses their business model. Further questions? OK, so if not, we are actually going to ask you to try and use some of these concepts. We have two basic questions for four or three different types of credentials. What are the quality features a typical credential already has in this area? And how could the quality of such credentials be improved? So the idea is that we are going to ask you to use the framework to first of all look at a bachelor's degree from a European university that's made up of credits and awarded by a paper certificate. Is this a quality credential? Is it not? How quality is it? And most importantly, what are the deficiencies of such a credential and how can we make it better? Question one? Question two, and the ideas will ask just three groups to spend about 10 minutes on each case. Case two, a MOOC certificate awarded by the Red Cross, and which is issued as an over batch. Again, what is the quality of such a certificate? And how can we improve this quality? And the third one, a MicroMasters issued by a US university and the credential is issued as let's say a signed scant document. But it's like has been written, it's been signed and it's scant due. And what we're looking at is both the quality of the statements in these and the quality of the meetings. Unfortunately, printing has been challenging this bit. So we're going to have to ask you to refer to the screen for the quality. So I just take a minute to remember the cases. I would, yes, write the cases here as well then, but we'll just do three groups. Case one, the university bachelor's degree on this side, the Red Cross certificate that's what it does imagine the middle, and we will do the MicroMasters by US university on the left. You don't have to stay at the table, you are. This might be a bit small to read, but we put all the quality criteria on one grid on the screen since we couldn't find printing for you. So that you could hopefully work with it here. I appreciate it's no idea, but thank you for the patience on that. And we'll give you 10 to 15 minutes and then I'll ask you back for each group, somebody to present how you think each of these three credential types could be improved and whether let's say this quality matrix gives you an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of these different credential types. Does that sound reasonable? Yes. Then to work with us and I would like to