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Education plays an important role in our society. Education has changed dramatically in the past decades as an industry. In addition to the traditional physical and now new virtual learning environments, education now occurs via peer-to-peer interactions and from anywhere in the world (Cognizant, 2019). With the trend of globalization, educational institutions have been struggling to use information technology for transformation. At the same time, the education sector must also cope with a heavy regulatory burden (Cognizant, 2019). As a simple example, sharing a school transcript currently requires an excessive amount of time and money compared with similar transactions in the digital world. In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, learners have become more mobile, moving in and out of school education as their jobs, health, and family situations change (Lemoie & Soares, 2020).
Currently, when individuals need to prove their education background and highlight their skill sets, they rely on their education institutions to certify their education and learning records. The education institutions keep the learners’ credentials and other records in proprietary formats in their systems. The data is structured to be accessed by each institution's internal systems and by dedicated online users with little or no interoperability. Any third party, which needs to verify those credentials, must connect to the education institution’s system.
Such a centralized credentialing system has several issues. First, with a rapid expansion of education in the form of distance learning, long-term and short-term training, vocabulary education, organizational e-mentoring and learning (Haran & Jeyaraj, 2019), and credit transfer schemes, a learner has a variety of flexible and distributed learning experiences. With such a diversified learning model and the increasingly common post-college education, there is an increasing growth in the number of educational credentials. As documented by Credential Engine, there are over 730,000 unique credentials in the United States alone (Credential Engine, 2019). With the growth of credentials across multiple providers, especially from those new and shorter-term education/training programs, it is difficult to document learning data to construct a complete learning portfolio for an individual learner and to share data with the interested stakeholders. Secondly, the centralized education credentialing system may not be available, the individual’s records may be lost, destroyed, or shared without consent or knowledge of the learner, and a learner often needs to pay fees to get a copy of his/her own records. The inability for individual learners to access or control their own records can inhibit opportunities and keep them in the dark about what information is actually in their records (Lemoie & Soares, 2020). Thirdly, due to a lack of transparency and a lack of universal verification platform between the credential issuers and credential verifiers, diploma fraud and education corruption have been a serious social problem all over the world. An estimation suggests that there are more than 5,000 unrecognized universities and diploma mills in the world, which issue over 200,000 fake degrees annually (Ezell, 2015). This has greatly impacted the ability of the employers to evaluate the qualifications of the job seekers and jeopardize the quality of the workforce.
With so many learners, employees, education institutions, education accreditation bodies, employers, and other stakeholders seeking to document, verify, and share evidence of the learners’ education and learning records, there is a need for a reliable, decentralized and transparent education credentialing system with characteristics of easy access, tamper-proof, and low costs. Education institutions, employers, and other stakeholders can use these credentials to conduct transactions such as college admissions or transfers, recruiting, and employee promotions. A reliable credential management system would reduce credential fraud, streamline education data sharing, reduce the overhead related to credential verification, and make moving between states and countries less complex (Kaur, 2021).