Yesterday, World Education Services (WES) announced it will issue blockchain-based digital badges. Their goal is to use blockchain as a way of recognizing international qualifications of its clients. The move reflects a popular industry belief that verifying educational credentials is a significant use case for blockchain technology.
As a non-profit organization that evaluates and advocates for the recognition of education qualifications in both Canada and the U.S., WES aims to create a better system of verifying the credentials of individuals and institutions.
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In the world today, the prevalence of fraud often makes verifying someone’s credentials a difficult task for employers and educational bodies. This is especially the case when considering overseas qualifications, as degrees and similar merits can be forged or otherwise lied about. “WES has provided internationally educated individuals with high-quality credential evaluation reports for 44 years,” said Mariam Assefa, executive director of WES, in a press statement. “Digital badges are a natural extension of that work. They allow holders to make their international educational qualifications both visible and verifiable online, and to share them when and how they want. Blockchain is an added value. It allows us to ensure the integrity of WES-issued educational verifications even online.”The organization aims to mitigate the issue of credential fraud through creating a system that would make use of ‘digital badges’. Purportedly, badges would be issued to clients confirmed to legitimately hold appropriate credentials. According to the team, it would be possible to display these badges on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. As a result, badge holders could provide proof of their educational credentials to potential employees and other institutions.
Utilizing blockchain and adjacent technologies as away of eliminating fraud is far from a new concept. Since the industry’s inception, leading pioneers and thinkers continue to speak about how the existence of blockchain technology could create new value for digital assets. Largely, this is due to the difficult-to-compromise nature of the technology. Blockchain often works through a public ledger, where it is extremely difficult for fraud to occur. Now, innovative projects are implementing blockchain-based solutions to create and ensure authenticity. In recent years, this has taken many forms. One example is with CryptoKitties and other digital collectibles, which are able to retain value thanks to their underlying technology. According to WES, the digital badges it plans to issue will be offered through Credly, a digital credential service provider. "As individuals and organizations leverage digital credentials to unlock opportunities, blockchain brings another, important layer of validation and trust that is especially relevant to international audiences," added Jonathan Finkelstein, Founder & CEO of Credly. Overall, blockchain's ability to foster authenticity and eliminate fraud could be a significant disruption to the world. World Education Services is slated to issue a pilot set of digital badges to a select handful of clients. After that, they plan to make them available to a broader set of users in the future.Image credit: WES logo
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