Significant effort is expended by both learning organisations and employers in authenticating the claims which are made in credentials. Freely available technology offers the possibility to entirely remove this work, making it easier and quicker to recognise micro-credentials and paving a way towards recognition becoming more commonplace.
In order of preference, policy and decision-makers should take the following actions to accelerate this:
- Incentivise credential issuers to issue verifiable digital credentials (such as digitally signed PDFs, or European Digital Credentials) wherever possible, and strongly discourage other formats.
- Promote trusted databases of credentials, and work with recognition authorities and issuers to make their credentials available through such databases. For example, in the U.S. 97% of credentials issued by post-secondary institutions are registered with the National Student clearinghouse, which allows any interested party who needs to verify credentials able to do so from a single source.
- Incentivise verification bodies to maintain and publish databases of completed recognitions. By maintaining such a database, the checks that have been done on one credential can be used to inform those being done on similar credentials. By publishing information about the recognition, other institutions recognising the credentials can benefit from the information.
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