A University-Led Effort

The Digital Credentials Consortium was founded in 2018 by leading universities with expertise in the design of verifiable digital credentials. Together, we are designing an infrastructure for digital credentials of academic achievement.

Digital technology has a profound effect on the way we learn.

A wealth of materials is available to us at all times. We can easily connect with other learners, or communicate with our professors. Increasingly, technology is acting as personal guide that can support our individual interests and pathways. But the way we issue and manage academic credentials has not changed that much - and doesn’t take advantage of the possibilities of digital technology.

What would an academic degree look like if it was designed today? Or a professional certificate? Or a certificate for an online course? As the question of trusted verification and authentication of learning and credentials poses itself with renewed urgency we need to rethink the way we recognize and transact with academic credentials.

Our mission is to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that will become the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying academic credentials, digitally.

Our Technology

We are exploring how recent advances credential data standards and cryptographically signed credentials can be used to rethink the way we recognize and transact with academic achievements.

Building on earlier efforts by the participating institutions, we are now setting our sights on the design and governance of a technology infrastructure for academic credentials – transforming credentials into tokens of social and human capital that can create new opportunities for participation in education and industry. Our Technology Working Group is currently developing a white paper.

As a learner, this technology will allow you to:

  • Maintain a compelling and verifiable record of your lifelong learning achievements to share with employers
  • Receive your credentials digitally and safely
  • Own all of your credentials forever without having to ask/pay your institution for a transcript ever again
  • Compile and curate credentials you receive from multiple educational institutions
Students working on computers
People walking toward a university building

For institutions, digital verifiable credentials enable you to:

  • Keep and distribute learner records in a way that is easy, safe, and inexpensive
  • Remove the risk of identity fraud
  • Issue multiple credentials to a single learner easily, using the same streamlined process

Explore our projects and open source libraries that demonstrate our technology.

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Our Projects

We are working on a number of projects to explore a digital credentials infrastructure.

Help us build the digital credential infrastructure that fits the future of education.

The DCC is an active participant in the W3C VC-EDU task force. If you are interested in contributing to the emerging technical standards for digital academic credentials, feel free to join the discussion.

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Founding Members

Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands)
Georgia Tech (USA)
Harvard University (USA)
Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam (Germany)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
McMaster University (Canada)
Tecnologico De Monterrey (Mexico)
TU Munich (Germany)
UC Berkeley (USA)
UC Irvine (USA)
University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
University of Toronto (Canada)