Kelly Robertson
It was back in 1868 when the fledgling Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Boylston Street awarded its first diplomas to 14 graduates. Since then, it has issued paper credentials to more than 207,000 undergraduate and graduate students in much the same way.
This summer, however, the change is in the air with 111 graduates becoming the first to have the option to receive their diplomas on their smartphones via an app, in addition to the traditional format. The pilot program was conducted in partnership between the MIT Registrar’s Office and Learning Machine, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software development company.
Mentioned app, called Blockcerts Wallet, enables students to easily get a verifiable, tamper-proof version of their diploma they can share with employers, schools, family, and friends. The underlying software relies on the blockchain technology, integrates with MIT’s identity provider, Touchstone — and for the first time — gives students autonomy over their own records.
“From the beginning, one of our primary motivations has been to empower students to be the curators of their own credentials,” Registrar and Senior Associate Dean Mary Callahan said in a statement. “This pilot makes it possible for them to have ownership of their records and be able to share them in a secure way, with whomever they choose.”
The Institute is among the first universities to make the leap, according to Chris Jagers, co-founder and CEO of Learning Machine.
“MIT has issued official records in a format that can exist even if the institution goes away, even if we go away as a vendor,” he said. “People can own and use their official records, which is a fundamental shift.”
Building the technology
When Callahan first read about blockchain a few years ago, she was immediately intrigued. Notably, she liked the fact that technology provided permanence, convenience, and a level of security worthy of the student record. She wondered could the Registrar’s Office use blockchain to issue digital records, like a diploma? And so Callahan decided to look into the possibility.
As it turned out, MIT has already started experimenting with the technology, with Philipp Schmidt — the director of learning innovation at the MIT Media Lab — beginning to issue internal, non-academic digital certificates to his team in 2015. Schmidt said he became interested in finding a “more modular credentialing environment, where you would get some kind of recognition for lots of things you did throughout your life.”
Soon, Learning Machine and Schmidt’s team at the Media Lab began to collaborate. Throughout 2016, the two teams developed an open-source toolkit called Blockcerts, which any developer or school can use to issue and verify blockchain-based educational credentials.
The next step was to conduct a small pilot, for which the Registrar’s Office was a perfect candidate.
Blockcerts Wallet makes things easy
The software Learning Machine developed uses the Bitcoin blockchain, which according to Jagers, is best suited for the application, because it prioritizes security over other qualities like speed, cost, or ease of use.
“We believe it’s still the right choice for official records that need to last a lifetime and work anywhere in the world,” he said.
Learning Machine also recognized early on that there was a missing link in the system, as students would be required to obtain both a public and private key.
“It’s a huge roadblock to tell students to go generate public-private key pairs for the Bitcoin blockchain,” Jagers says. “Nobody has any idea what you’re talking about.”
The Blockcerts Wallet app solves that problem by generating the public-private key pair and sending the public key to MIT, where it is written into the digital record. From there, a one-way hash (a string of numbers that can be used for verification later) is added to the blockchain. The diploma information itself doesn’t go onto the blockchain, just the timestamped transaction indicating that MIT created the digital record. Finally, MIT emails the digital diploma in the form of a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file with the student’s public key inscribed into it. Because the mobile app on the student’s phone has their unique private key, the student can prove ownership of the diploma.
The pilot and the benefits
As part of the pilot program, the Registrar’s Office contacted 85 master of finance and 26 master of science in media arts and sciences June graduates to let them know their digital diplomas were available via the Blockcerts Wallet app.
The app lets students share their diplomas almost immediately with whomever they please, free of charge, without an intermediary. This is important for those needing to prove to an employer or another university that they have an MIT diploma, with the third party being able to easily verify that the diploma is legitimate without contacting the Registrar’s Office. Using a portal, employers or schools can paste a link or upload a student’s digital diploma file and receive a verification immediately.
The portal essentially acts as a blockchain-based notary service, locating the transaction ID, verifying the keys, and confirming that nothing has been altered since the record was added.
“Our goals were to build our own knowledge and confidence, while utilizing student feedback,” Callahan said. “We believe this adds great value to higher education.”
She went on to add that MIT has already received inquiries about the pilot from a number of universities around the world and from colleagues in the European Commission.
There’s more…
Both Callahan and Jagers agree that the blockchain technology has enormous potential.
One possible application is creating stackable certificates on the blockchain, which would enable an individual to link credentials from different institutions, such as — for example — an undergraduate degree from one university, a graduate degree from another, and a professional certification.
Meanwhile, the Registrar’s Office has expanded the digital diploma pilot to include a cohort of students who graduated in September. Going forward, Callahan hopes to explore the possibility of offering digital records for other learning credentials MIT students may obtain from programs such as MIT Professional Education, the Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program, and the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program.
“We’ve just begun to scratch the surface of where this will lead. It’s really an exciting time,” she says.
