"One of the core aspects of a (w)holistic education is learners taking ownership of their learning. We do this by inviting learners to be co-creators in designing their educational journey. In issuing them their first Blockcert digital credentials, we have taken this further to ensure that learners have complete ownership over the credentials they have earned." - Arun Kapur, Founder, Pallavan school
We have all probably been there - graduating from school and applying to university or an internship only to find that there is a complicated and time-consuming process of sending and verifying our transcripts. This is not merely a long and expensive process but it is ineffective, in our experience. Moreover, we did not want our learners, our future leaders, to leave with just a transcript or a degree. We wanted to convey a rich wholistic picture of their achievements. With these factors in mind, in 2018, we embarked on the pilot project of providing our learners with Blockcerts credentials - one that is customised to our school, learner owned, tamper-evident, instantly shareable and verifiable in real-time.
What process did we follow?
We did our research on what our key outputs & outcomes were. We then mapped this to our long term goals and identified a trusted partner in Learning Machine, NY to help us successfully implement this product. We created a customised template to cater to the Five Areas of Development curriculum we follow in our school, along with inputs from staff and students alike. We created mock credentials and went through the process of issuing mock credentials. We then did an onboarding with the rest of the staff and students on how these credentials work. Once we were ready to issue we carried out the following steps:
1) Sent an invite from the school to students to receive their blockchain credential
2) The student accepted the invite and sent us their blockchain address
3) The school sends the credential to the student
4) Student receives the credential on the Blockcerts app
5) Student is free to share their credential with anyone they choose (e.g university admissions, employer)
6) Verifier checks the blockchain to verify the credential. They can either do this on our custom portal here or the universal Blockcerts portal here
Moving forward, we plan to certify participants of our teacher development program using these credentials too. In the next phase we are looking to enrich these credentials by having evidence of student work in rich media format.
If you would like to view an introduction presentation on our project, you can do so here
