Digital credentials are redefining the future of education, offering a transformative approach to validating skills and competencies across a learner’s journey. As higher education institutions adopt these credentials, they encounter both opportunities and challenges in aligning institutional practices with a rapidly evolving need for personalized, lifelong learning pathways. In this interview, Eric Sembrat discusses the systemic shift in digital credentials, how to effectively implement them and what barriers stand in the way.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): How would you describe the systemic shifts that digital credentials are driving across higher education?
Eric Sembrat (ES): There are a couple of areas where digital credentials are either driving change or acting as a consequence. First, we need to consider incorporating digital credentials embedded in the organization into the academic record, and the related security safeguards and governance behind those issuances throughout the educational journey. That incorporation is important, not only for assessing skills and competencies but also for the holistic student experience—extracurricular activities and professional development—where you really get the value and differentiation of an institution’s educational experience and the learner’s journey.
Secondly, we’re seeing a shift to embracing lifelong learning experiences in higher education. At Georgia Tech, we recently launched our College of Lifetime Learning to meet present and future learners at the intersection of reskilling, upskilling and learning opportunities that come with the increasingly fast pace of technological and industry changes. Digital credentials fit into a personalized learning journey within an academic program that codifies that individual and unique learning journey.
Evo: What are some cultural and institutional barriers that arise when trying to implement digital credentials within an ecosystem?
ES: I approach this from two perspectives: institutional barriers and cultural barriers. Institutionally, academia tends to show resistance with a more agile, experimental and iterative entrepreneurial mindset. We often see agility from startups in taking bigger risks or, as our president outlined in our recent campus update, big bets. Buy-in at decentralized institutions that may have siloed digital credentials throughout the organization can be tricky when trying to bring everyone together. It doesn’t happen overnight and in many cases it is as much a sociocultural barrier as it is an institutional barrier.
From a cultural standpoint, implementing governance policies and procedures that fit sociocultural expectations of your institution can also be a challenge. These processes aren’t emergent. They are a reflection of your organization’s vision, voice and practices. It’s important to put your ear to the ground and understand your culture, so you can then incorporate it into your policies and procedures. Talk to instructors, students, registrars, admissions, course designers, information technology and communications, to understand their perspectives, wants and concerns.
Intersecting both these areas is building a consensus toward a digital credentials visual design. The badge image needs to match institutional brand requirements while providing an external understanding to employers and stakeholders. That ask is easier said than done, and we typically get embedded deep in our organizational, institutional culture without coming up for air. What do our industry partners want? What do the organizations that hire our graduates look for? How do these audiences digest our digital credentials if at all? There’s a fundamental need to provide a cohesive understanding of the digital credential’s scale and scope regardless of our sociocultural and historical background. It’s a tall task but something to which we can make incremental gains by normalizing terminology, institutional brand usage and how we position digital credentials in the learning experience.
Evo: How do digital credentials impact those perceptions of higher ed’s value, not only among students but also faculty and employers?
ES: Digital credentials serve as piecemeal accomplishments to differentiate learners’ experiences and provide evidence and validation of their personalized learning journey of skills and competencies. There’s a lot of differentiation in how students get educational value because the student population is individually varied. So, in an ideal world, digital credentials will fit to assess, validate and recognize individual competences and expertise.
When we change our lens to think about lifetime learning, we recognize that we continue to learn and grow as adults and that adulthood encompasses a large swath of our life’s educational journey. We’re the folks enrolled in a formal educational program or passively engaging with an institution at our own pace for the learning experience. Digital credentials provide tacit recognition of the whole learning experience and, more importantly, drill it down to a more piecemeal educational experience. They’re a great toolset for the future of education and that lifetime learning model. Providing recognition of the learning journey, in addition to traditional workforce outlets through interpersonal interactions like endorsements, allows students to identify, hone and grow those skills.
For faculty, that’s a big, unanswered challenge. So many faculty are already wading into various disciplines and fields in the instructional journey, and this is another tool for which they may not have received proper training. There’s ample opportunity for institutions to educate, train or position their faculty on the modern utilization of digital credentials that helps them fit it into their academic processes, educational outreach and courses. I’m particularly fascinated by how this is happening in universities and how we can adopt these trainings outside our institutional walls to a broader audience.
Evo: What role do strategic partnerships play in developing digital credentials?
ES: Strategic partnerships are a real window of transparency into workforce needs and the work being done to discover where the mismatches and opportunities are. The intersection of those partnerships provides a greater coupling that helps incorporate digital credentials more holistically. Those partnerships give us insight into what the workforce is looking for. These shouldn’t be one-off discussions but continuous, regular and impactful discussions and relationships that build understanding.
There’s exponential value in higher education reflecting that pillar of local and regional impact. Digital credentials provide a good reflection of our partnerships with our local community as the last mile from the institutional borders to the communities we serve, and that make up the fabric of our physical presence and impact.
Evo: What strategies can institutions use to effectively implement digital credentials?
ES: At Georgia Tech, we have approached digital credentials from a research, experimental lens to better understand the pedagogical impact on student experience. The transition from an institutional research-lensed mindset to something more formalized and governed doesn’t happen overnight. It has been a long process for us to understand the state of the credential market and the use cases for identified stakeholders. We performed a deep dive into the ecosystem of technology platforms to support all this. It’s crucial to facilitate any scale we’d like to achieve, and open source tools presently don’t meet that need. Our founding membership and continued work with MIT’s Digital Credentials Consortium work toward that goal—to democratize access to digital credentials’ issuance, validation and governance.
We’ve seen many presentations on digital credentials falling into two pillars: for-credit and non-credit experiences. But we have a third pillar for extracurricular we need to account for. How do we position and validate digital credentials for student organizations? Makerspaces? Entrepreneur programs?
I’m not aware of any institution that has a Wild West digital credentials ecosystem, where faculty, students or staff can self-serve based on a single vendor or multiple. It’s just not sustainable. It dilutes and individualizes your brand and educational achievement, and puts digital credentials on this uneven ground. Governance and process are critical, not only for validation but also to ensure programs are on equal footing and building equity internally.
Digital credentials live under one roof—the institution. So, building a common language is very important. We have to be cognizant of an all-encompassing open intent for what the population looks like and continue to build outreach. There’s always an opportunity to turn something that doesn’t fit into credit or non-credit into codified knowledge or provide validation learners can show for it.
Evo: How can institutions ensure their digital credential systems remain flexible and adaptive no matter what comes at them?
ES: It’s important to keep abreast of technological changes in technical innovations, whether it’s W3C’s work with Verifiable Credentials, 1EdTech’s OpenBadges standards or how we see federal or accrediting policies or practices shape these technologies. These technological changes require some fundamental adjustments to how we work with digital credentials. For example, the work with OpenBadges v3 and Verifiable Credentials to allow learners to own their digital credentials in a digital wallet is a seismic shift. The historical methods of digitally owning a digital credential outside a platform—baked images or SVGs, exported JSON—simply doesn’t match a nontechnical learner’s user experience.
Who is examining or validating their digital credential images for baked metadata? That’s a technical solution solving a technical problem, not an end-user problem. So, the digital wallet feels closer to a real solution. It’s a seismic shift to state that digital wallets are here to stay, and we have to get everyone in the ecosystem to be comfortable with it. A digital wallet isn’t just your phone’s operating system and its implementation of a wallet; it’s a standard that can and likely is built in some fashion into your phone’s apps already.
MIT’s Digital Credentials Consortium is on the front lines of collaborating with policies and practices as these new technologies arise. The consortium is looking to build a commonality of intersection between issuer registries for compatibility. We want a common framework to understand the validity and verification of these issuer registries. That kind of equity can then help create scalability and transparency in a way that makes technology do the heavy work.
Looking to the future, I see abstractions of digital credentials—and verifiable credentials—as a framework for implementation standards and expectations. I expect them to be presented in all products and tools in some shape or form. Why aren’t our video game achievements verifiable credentials that can live beyond the console’s lifetime? What about more abstract concepts like portfolio work? Historical documents? Licenses and registrations? Grades and assessments? We have to approach the future with the ability to match a governance and institutional buy-in process to the various platforms where digital credentials are produced, and digital credentials and the associated trust networks give a pretty wide berth for use.
Evo: Is there anything you’d like to add?
ES: We—myself, Jonna Lee, Manuni Dhruv, alongside Javier Motta-Mena from Arizona State and Jacob Askeroth from Purdue Global—are currently working on research and discovery to codify what a digital credential looks like. We want to understand the digital credentials ecosystem from a visual design standpoint. Traditionally, higher ed has built out internal taxonomies or categorizations that are either internally focused brand representations or complicated or obtuse visual representations of rigor and quality. We’re taking a visual design approach because, while a small part of digital credentials, it’s that sneak peek into the credential itself. It’s a first look and a high-level overview that a recruiter, admissions officer, employer and virtually any human would encounter first.
My overarching research question is what digital credentials’ visual design standards look like institution to institution or across the nation. What’s the difference in visual design? Is there a common language that can be codified into some understanding of what the common expectation is? Have we organically, implicitly developed some standard we’re subconsciously reflecting in our work? Are there buckets of different categorizations of visual design standards that institutions use when creating these credentials, either defined implicitly or explicitly? These are big questions we don’t currently have the answer to, but I want to find out as we look to using and implementing digital credentials.
These questions are crucial because they directly influence our build-out of taxonomies, standards and implementations at various levels. We typically either follow our brand colors or use some agnostic shape like a shield or circle, but I wonder aloud each time whether our audiences ingest this meaning. What about if their digital credentials wallet represents multiple institutions or organizations? How do you navigate the conflicting taxonomy where we’ve abstracted complexity just to be different or match our internal, institutional socioculture? That high-level view of a digital credential’s first look can help bridge the gap between higher education and industry, holistically bringing digital credentials together for the workforce and professional development toward lifetime learning. It can help alleviate that scale problem for a recruiter assessing dozens of digital credentials per client, relieving them of parsing our institutional lingo or taxonomic rigor. I’m truly excited to see what we uncover because, frankly, I don’t know what to expect. It’s a Wild West out there, and I’m very interested to see what we’ve subconsciously developed and codified around.
Eric will continue this conversation at the Digital Credentials Summit in March, 2025.
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