 Hello everybody, thank you for soldiering through with us on a sunny Barcelona afternoon. I appreciate that there are far more interesting, or rather, there are far more welcoming clients to be in. At least personally I'd love to be out in the sun. But I hope you're willing to punish us. Here we have a party. Yes. We're all here as masochists. Is that an option? No one gave me that option. So, why do you want to talk about this afternoon? We talked about quality credentials this morning, but now we're going to talk about the same topic in a couple of weeks. And that is the idea of open credentials. And we thought it might be interesting to contextualize this work. It's a deal for discussion of open integration. So... Anthony, sorry before we forget, we should make it clear first that... Is there one hour session? Yes, there's a mistake in the program. You're not here for two and a half hours. You're here, I think, for one hour, 15 minutes, something like that. But it obviously finishes before the next parallel session. What does this photo make you think of? It's so abstract. The gap is probably big enough to sneak through. Okay. What's the last thing? Frontier. Locked. Locked. Close doors. What it makes me think of is closed. And closed has a few different meanings. When something's closed, you have no idea what's inside. It can only be used the way the person controlling the gate intends to. And because it's locked and you can't go in, it doesn't really help out. One of the reasons we like talking about open integration is that education is supposed to be a public good. And public goods can't really work as closed. And what that means concretely, actually so far, has meant open access to educational activities, use of OERs, and empowerment of students through an education practice has zero familiarities terms. And if you were to map it onto a typical process model, you would say that we talk about inputs. Open educational resources are inputs to education. That concept has been developed to look at the processes. So it's been developed to look at open educational practices that are using OERs in teaching. But we feel there's a little bit missing in this model, which is an output. And the output of this process is, of course, many things, but also in terms of the documents, the educational credentials. And so my question would be, are educational credentials open? And simply enough, the argument would be, you take a typical degree, I mean this is, by the way, for every one of Western universities, this is the first image I did when I just searched a degree certificate in Google Images. But, okay, Khan Siddhu has received a Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University. There's no knowledge of what's inside the certificate. It can only be used if you have a gatekeeper intended. It's in only each one of certain conditions. And the public benefit is questionable. And what I want to suggest to you is that actually credentials are broken. And it isn't just paper credentials that are broken, even digital credentials are broken. The system is broken. And the reason the system is broken is made up of five issues. First of all, we have limited access to underlying information. Secondly, credentials are still paper-based. Thirdly, we still have a lack of technical standards for credential information. We use closed standards for security and verification and we don't aggregate credential data. And I won't talk about each of these. So first of all, in terms of the underlying information, what does that mean? What does this Bachelor of Arts mean? What did this person actually learn? I don't have a clue. So without a link to it in every scenario, we already have an issue here. Now at least for higher education, we've developed diploma supplements to solve this problem. But diploma supplements are a creature of all real higher education. This problem exists across all of education. Second problem... Can I just give you another way of answering this question? Yes. What it would mean to me is I would then go and look at the international ranking of that university and they would help me understand what they're doing. Then you will very much like what I'm going to put on the next slide. I would like to agree with you. So people in education do have a habit of saying that the answer to everything is just describe it in more detail. And from a credentials perspective, that has an issue. So when you look at surveys from employers, it shows pretty clearly that the average employer would not actually research a credentials. 72% of employers spend less than 50 minutes reviewing a CV. Top to bottom. If you have something rather insulting there, it shows that employers are detailed. No problem. It was a presentation over the last, so... No problem. We just assumed you were sexy and had me with a cowboy. No, I'm okay. Class is in Columbia. So... Yeah, the average employer won't research a credentials. So, 50 minutes is normal of time to verify everything you've learned if they don't recognize that they really want to show cuts. Forget what you learned. Check the rest of the university. The other interesting thing is that employers are increasingly using automated tools to actually screen surveys. So 95% of 4500 police now use some sort of automated screening software, which basically searches CV from keywords before you even seize them. So again, in respect of your diploma supplement, if you have something that's rather exotic, you are going to have problems getting in filters. And what I'd like to postulate to you is that if it costs an employer more to verify the credential than it will cost them to administer you a test to verify the skills, then your credential is effectively worthless. Because if I give you an exam, instead of checking your credential, because it's cheaper for me to give you an exam, then the credential is not the paper it's written on because I'm ignoring the credential. So, the point I'm trying to make here is that for a credential to be valuable, it needs to be efficient. And ideas like diploma supplements are very good in theory, but they hit a point where they lose their efficiency very, very quickly. Another problem with credentials, paper credentials are hard to use and to share. So, all right, that's really bad here. Now, again, I'm not picking on the University of Nottingham. Random Google search. These were the poor guys who ended up at the top of the list. But I literally just searched University transcript prices. Yes, you can get paper credentials. These documents can take up to five working days to produce. This not included delivery period, obviously. I mean, I can get a new kitchen delivered by Amazon next day, but a piece of paper from the University takes me two weeks, which is a piece of paper I should own anyway. And I mean, that's basic. It's not the University of Nottingham. This is typical. So, again, there's a case to say that there is something broken with the system here. Fast-fights. Yes, very true. I mean, I thought you could imagine what my home in the University would do. And I was already into this. There's no technical standards for credentials. There's no technical standards for the technology. There's no technical standards for what they should contain. There's no technical standards for the keywords. Now, that isn't just an efficiency problem. That is actually an exclusion problem. 62% of employers who use software to screen applications admit that it kicks out perfectly qualified candidates just because they don't use the right keywords or hit the right profiles from the automated software. And again, it isn't really a problem that software is racist. Although you can go into that discussion, it's a problem that because there are no standards for this software, what's for insurance is more or less random. If that isn't enough, the standards we do have for security and verification are generally closed standards. So, even if we wanted to move away from paper certificates, if you actually look at what digital signing costs. Now, I mean, paper signing costs about what sort of appendices, 50, 60 cents, and you can use it for several thousand documents. Again, I'm not picking the document sign, digital signature, first hit, if you're the first to give me another presentation. $10 per month or $120 annually just for the privilege of writing a digital signature and let's face it, digital signatures are one kilo by five. It's a little bit aggregarious. And the reason they can charge this is because the systems are closed and they have coaxing the model at least over their own little walled gardens. So, again, even if we went digital, we'd have to deal with this problem. So, again, there's an issue of the standards being closed. And finally, there's no aggregation of credential criteria. So, we are issuing all these credentials around the world. We'll give them to students. They are mentioning learning outcomes and skills and qualifications achieved. But they're given to students and they basically lie there. Nobody's aggregating these and using them for skills forecasting or figuring out the jobs of the futures or figuring out the qualification, et cetera. No, we do new surveys linked to the labor force and so on to actually get this data. But we're actually producing it not just for hybridism. So, again, it's highly, highly inefficient. So, here's my summary. Our system of credentials today is closed. What that means is it's extensive. It's hard to use in share. It hinders open education by failing to evidence open learning pathways in a transparent manner. It excludes the people. It's the most of them. They can be abused by networks of intermediaries to create these closed software systems and they're not used to inform policy. And that's the system which we are very happy using today. So, my argument to you is it's time to open credentials. It's time to do the roles to open. We should disrupt credentials for a public good and I'm very, very cautious using the word disruption because it's overused. But I honestly truly believe that credentials are useful. And one of the reasons I believe that credentials are right for disruption is because we already have all the pieces to build an open credential system in our hands. They're all out there. All they need is something to actually put the pieces together. Piece number one, EU standards for qualifications. So, the EU has been working on bits and pieces of this for years. EQF, Diploma Supplement Credit Transfer System, ESCO and so on. But none of these are a full part of the puzzle. The European Qualifications Framework is not for non-formal education or for micro credentials. Only basically things that are a year or more a year or more are covered. European Diploma Supplement, great idea. Only for degrees. European Credit Transfer System, only for higher education and even though you need 180 CTS to make up bachelors they're not actually a formal part of the degree. You have a degree and you have the ECTS. If Diploma Supplement describes your ECTS but isn't part of the degree and you have the European Skills Competencies Qualifications and Occupations Database which is this massive database by the EU with I think 30,500 occupations describing the skills of those occupations and it's in all languages of the EU but that's not used by any of these tools. So, you see that the bits are kind of variable. We also have technical circuits. So, OpenBudgets has been around for well over a decade and OpenBudgets has built up what is actually quite an impressive infrastructure for digital credentials. It's taken care of letting issuers do it. It's taken care of authentication. It's taken care of storage. It's taken care of different ways to display and share the credentials. It's a good, good system but honestly, nobody's really using it in formal education. And the question I would ask you is the problem that it's basically too open to be useful. I can issue a badge for jumping three times per week and put it next to a degree and have those linings to each other in my wallet and that's perfectly possible with OpenBudgets. So maybe OpenBudgets, the adoption problem is actually that they're too open to be useful. We also have national ID systems. I'm not sure what countries you're from but I think most countries in the EU now are issuing you with free digital IDs to access your text services and your online government services and so on. Now, when we use properly those digital IDs can be used to sign documents. So, actually, we could replace those private providers charging $120 a year just to sign signatures and use our national IDs. This one's the example of the Slovene website and we don't have to understand the Slovenian on it but the point is this looks like early 1990s web design. I mean, all it's missing is the GIS and the geosities pattern. So the question is, are these national digital IDs which have the technical infrastructure in place too complex to be actually used by normal human beings? Unless you're an expert on digital signing you're never going to figure out how to actually sign a document. And we also have new technologies. So, with blockchains you don't need an intermediary to sign a document at all. So you don't need a third party to actually help certify the document. You can do it directly and transfer it directly. But blockchain, again, is a property. This has basically been around for a couple of years meeting the public consciousness. So I mean, even though it has a lot of promise this is an extremely, extremely, extremely un-technological. And one other question. We also already have a global platform for skills. I'm not making any promotion here but it's called LinkedIn. And if I want to know what skills you have and what job you work for and your employment history I check your LinkedIn profile. So, but I put this screenshot for LinkedIn LinkedIn is a private company. It has a freemium model. It charges for the valuable services and charges quite generously for the services. And if it grows big enough, the question becomes should one company actually have a monopoly on skills and occupation? I have nothing against LinkedIn. They're like super good. But monopoly law exists for a reason. And network effects look to this very seriously. So, if you take all these bits and pieces I've been talking about you'll actually come up with the elements of a system for open credentials. User-held credentials, open standards and open text stack behind it. Independent verification without any intermediaries and open aggregation. You put these elements together and you could say this is a vision for open credentials. So, enough of the theory to type some shameless self-promotion. We have been working on some of these ideas in the credentials projects we're running. So, we were mentioning that we're running two projects that will be passed in Micro-WG and one of the main ideas under OVPAS is that we should create digital standard format for documenting open education credentials. That is loosely based on the CTS. So, we basically are starting that this learning is learning and if we look at the way higher education over the past 25 years has created systems to measure your learning and learning units there's no real reason why that can't be extended to any type of learning. So, it's not a super radical idea. It's an extension of what exists already. But, leads to everything we were talking about we decided that we want to describe that in terms of a learning possible. And, you could call the learning possible a diploma supplement, but for any kind of learning. And what we figured is we have to write a generic report on the diploma supplement we made in the learning possible. We've actually been building this as a formal standard. So, we have a list of fields. We've been developing a formal metadata standard for it and we've been describing a simple but formal ontology that describes its concepts. Which also sets up the structure for what can be a software system in the future. We've been working on part of this problem. So, the SQL database I talked about before actually already developed a system for qualifications and the metadata standard for qualifications. But again, it's for qualifications. Thanks to our work within a year and also by the accredited institution. But, we said rather than invent a wheel let's take that metadata standard that already exists and let's fork it. And just add the fields you need to actually use it as a credentialing system for authentication. And so, what we ended up with was a system that's made up of five parts. One that parallels information about the important body that has information like the public key who's accredited it, homepage of the institution, that kind of stuff.