Our Work

The Digital Credentials Consortium is exploring how recent advances in credential data standards and cryptographically signed credentials can be used to rethink the way we recognize and transact with academic achievements.

Building on earlier efforts by the participating institutions, we are designing a governance system and technology infrastructure for academic credentials—transforming credentials into tokens of social and human capital that can create new opportunities for participation in education and industry.

Our Activities

Issuer Registry Research and Pilot

The DCC is collaborating with Credential Engine on a project exploring the current state of issuer registries, stored lists of data which verify the identity of an issuer of a credential. The project team will conduct comprehensive research on existing registries, identifying their functions and limitations with the goal of developing a working prototype and set of guidelines for organizations seeking to develop issuer registries for issuing verifiable credentials.

The Issuer Registry Project will seek input and expertise from the digital credentials community in part through the formation of an advisory group and the piloting of technology which will test implementation, hosting, and governance. See the Issuer Research Advisory Group invitation for information on how you can collaborate with us on this work.

Standards Support

The DCC contributes to the efforts of open standards bodies that foster interoperability and collaboration around verifiable credentials including:

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Verifiable Credentials for Education Task Force (VC-EDU)
• W3C Credentials Community Working Group
• Open Wallet Foundation

And DCC works with 1EdTech on Open Badges and the Comprehensive Learner Record.

Ecosystem Map

Through the convening of stakeholders representing higher education, workforce boards, human resources platforms, advocacy groups and think tanks, the DCC collaborated on mapping the Learning and Employment Record (LER) Ecosystem. This digital tool describes the LER lifecycle and the workstreams and interactions between key stakeholders, including the value proposition for learners, administrators, and employers. Visit the LER Ecosystem Map.

Open Source Software

All of the software developed by DCC for issuing and verifying credentials, its wallet and verifier, and underlying libraries are open source and available on Github.

Credential Issuing

The DCC maintains open source software and code libraries to issue verifiable academic digital credentials. Organizations and individuals can run stand alone credential issuing software or integrate DCC libraries to issue credentials from their own locally developed software.

Wallet for Digital Academic Credentials

The DCC Learner Credential Wallet (LCW) is an open source mobile application for storing and sharing academic achievements with verifiable credentials that is available for iOS and Android.

Verification of Digital Academic Credentials

Supported digital academic credentials can be verified at DCC’s VerifierPlus website. This fully functional verifier is one of many verification sites we envision for digital academic credentials.

Registries

The DCC maintains a number of registries to enable a verifier to confirm that a given Verifiable Credential was signed by a known issuer. DCC’s registries include:

• DCC Member Registry: For DCC Member production issuers
• DCC Pilot Registry: For DCC Member pilots
• Community Registry: For community members, curated by the DCC
• Sandbox Registry: For testing only