Dr. Kerri Lemoie | Community-driven Interoperability
“The Open Badge Community is the infrastructure. Open Badges has been a community-driven effort since the beginning [in about 2011].”
— Kerri Lemoie, Ph.D. (2016).
If you wanted to discern the heart and brain trust of the badging community or do a list of the OG’s in the digital credentialing space, the name that would appear on everyone’s list would be Dr. Kerri Lemoie, Director of Technology, at the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC), being incubated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Regarded as “the best in the digital credential business.” Kerri will be attending the Badge Summit, speaking on Open Badges and Open Recognition and the phenomena of verifiable digital credentials in education through the lens of the Laws of Media.
A Socio-technical Visionary and Leader in Open Badges!
With a doctorate in Media Psychology, focused on Technology Adoption of Self-sovereign Digital Identity [1] Kerri is one of the founding technical contributors to Open Badges. She has been working on digital credentialing, open recognition, and social impact for over 20 years, bringing care, community, and technical wizardry to every project and team she works with.
She has served in multiple leadership positions over the years and currently serves as the Director of Technology at the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC) and co-chair of the W3C Verifiable Education Task Force. She also serves on the Governing Body of the Trusted Learner Network (TLN) at Arizona State University (ASU).
At the DCC she is leading the development of a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying digital academic credentials. In her role as co-chair of the W3C Verifiable Education Task Force, she shepherds the global community that is aligning learning and employment records.
Acknowledged as one of the “Ten in Tech” by the State of Rhode Island for her contributions to education and technology, Kerri’s research has informed organizations such as the American Council on Education, the US Dept of Education, and the US Dept of Ed Office of Education Technology (OEDT) about Education and Blockchain [2] and Understanding Interoperable Standards in Education.
For people entering the space or just starting to build, it is very common for them to discover Dr. Lemoie’s work, and find out she has already done what they are thinking or proposing to do. This has been recognized in the community as the “Oh! Kerri did it!” effect.
Community-driven Interoperability and LERs
I caught up with Kerri and asked her a few questions about Open Badges, the digital credential community, and some of the key themes she sees emerging in the space. She also shared about the work of the DCC which she will be sharing more about at this year’s Badge Summit.
What was it about badges, micro-, and digital credentials that drew you to this space?
In 2011 I was working as a technology consultant for Providence After School Alliance (PASA) in Providence, Rhode Island. They had a program called The Hub for high school students to participate in after-school activities like coding, building bikes, and dancing while earning credit toward graduation.
The director of The Hub, Damian Ewans, learned about the Digital Media Learning Competition and which was funding initiatives to issue badges. The Hub seemed like a great situation for the students to earn badges so we applied and fortunately, our project was one of the first funded projects. We were awarded $75k from the Mozilla Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to build out a module to issue badges on a Drupal platform.
Out of the competition and through the work of the Open Badges team at the Mozilla Foundation and HASTAC, a community of technologists, designers, academics, educators, and policymakers flourished. This community became a movement that really paved the way for open recognition, recognizing lifelong learning and learning that happens anywhere at any time. It was this community that created the foundation for the work that we are all doing today in the LER ecosystem. I feel fortunate to have landed in this community and this work. I’ve had the opportunity to meet amazing people from all over the world, many of whom have become my close friends.
What is it about the technology that you think is really a good fit for learners?
Open Badges provides structured data that describes an achievement and that achievement could describe any experience that happens anywhere, anyplace anytime. Now that they are aligned with W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs), these achievements can be verified using standardized cryptographic methods without being hosted on web servers. Earners can store them in digital wallets alongside their government documents, degrees, etc. which inevitably will be issued using Verifiable Credentials too.
What is one theme you see emerging this year in the skills and credentialing space that is really important for us as a community to focus on and discuss?
Interoperability. Let’s keep talking about activities like JFF PlugFest and interoperability and why it is so important for learners to have access to and control of their data. I believe we can build a more trustworthy internet and this is one way to start. It is only fair that data about us should be in our hands. We shouldn’t need to pay for access to and proof of our learning and employment records and we should be able to decide who can view this data. This is part of why I do that work. It seems that I’m not alone because since we introduced Open Badges 3.0, people have been really drawn to this.
What is it about interoperability that makes you so passionate about it?
The web is based on standards that make it possible for us to use the web in the same way on different browsers and devices — for instance, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; for content, payments, and overall accessibility, etc. Consider digital photos, which even though are taken using hundreds of different devices around the world, are understood ubiquitously in every web and mobile app down to the type of camera used, location, and the date taken. All of that is possible because of standards that make the technology interoperable. Interoperable and verifiable LERs work like this. The Verifiable Credentials standard has been created and decided upon at W3C which is the primary organization for web standards. When more applications implement Verifiable Credentials and standards like Open Badges, there will be more opportunities to use them.
What is one misconception or assumption you see people having about digital credentials that you’d love the community to talk more about?
I think there are some misunderstandings about what the term LER means and what interoperability means. We can do a better job explaining the technologies and their value propositions. There are many aspects to consider when developing digital credentials for learning and employment records especially when considering how to design them as part of our existing education and hiring systems including change management, assessments, ontologies, etc. A big step in the right direction is to use the Verifiable Credential standard as the framework to build upon.
Additionally, we mostly discuss Verifiable Credentials as structured and verified data and this is a great start. Next, we should start discussing the exchanges that happen between issuers and earners and earners and verifiers. The JFF Plugfests are about this. There are standardized methods and recommendations for VCs to be requested, digitally signed, transported, and verified. Two critical aspects include: 1) earners of credentials request that they be issued to an identity they provide and that there is no issuance until that exchange is facilitated by the wallet application,, and 2) that verification happens without contacting the issuer (no calling home) so that if the issuer is no longer available or the earner would like to have their credentials verified in private they can.
When you consider where we are as a community today, compared to where we were about 5 years ago, what is one development that really gets you excited?
Today, we have the Open Recognition Alliance which grew out of the Open Badging Community after the transition from Mozilla to IMS Global (1EdTech). I’m grateful that there is still a community that values recognition of informal and non-formal learning experiences in addition to the more formal method. When we started doing open badges, the concept of lifelong learning and the 60-year curriculum didn’t exist yet. This community has provided the foundations for this thinking.
Demystifying the DCC’s Software Suite!
About a year ago, Dr. Lemoie joined the team at the DCC as their Director of Technology. At this year’s Badge Summit, she will be sharing more about the consortium’s suite of software technologies being built and tested to support the community.
“DCC has a range of open-source software for issuing, verifying, and storing verifiable digital credentials. Our GitHub repo is loaded with software that our international consortium has been using for research and pilots. We also have a VC-compatible wallet, the Learner Credential Wallet (LCW), that we created in partnership with the US Department of Education. Not too long ago we launched VerifierPlus (in beta) where Open Badges 3.0 can be verified in the web interface and through the LCW where earners can create verifiable URLs to the VerifierPlus that they can share online.
The DCC is focused on making it easier for institutions and the broader ecosystem to issue VCs. We’re also shifting from pilots to production implementations. For example, two of our members are working towards issuing their degrees as Open Badges 3.0. To do this, we’ve been developing very flexible and modular components that can be run via Docker hubs and integrated into any system. In the past, Open Badges required web hosting, and since this is no longer true with Verifiable Credentials and Open Badges 3.0, we believe that issuing can be done via API through any platform or system like student information systems and LMSs.
The DCC is concentrating on Open Badges 3.0 compliance right now because it’s easier to create strategies and implement the issuance of single achievement credentials and because we can now use this standard for any type of achievement. But we’re active with all of the learning and employment records standards groups. On top of Open Badges 3.0, we are also including the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL), and staying on top of advancements with other standards like the Comprehensive Learner Record and the European Learning Model.”
I asked Dr. Lemoie what her team's key focus was on in the design of the technology suite, and she shared the importance of making it both “easier” for people and “a lot more useful” to use. The team is especially looking forward to nerding out about it with the community to ensure it is community-driven, and designed with the principles of interoperability at the heart — bringing all her work since the founding of Open Badges full circle!
We look forward to learning more with Kerri about the work the DCC team is up to at this year’s Badge Summit.
To learn more and connect with Dr. Lemoie visit her LinkedIn Profile or follow and read her collection of Medium articles where she shares regularly (and has for years) about Interoperability, Verifiable Learning and Employment Records, the Future of Open Badges, and the role of Community as Infrastructure… amongst other topics in a series of online papers.
Sources
[1] Lemoie, K. (2021). Determinants of Behavioral Intention to Use a Self-Sovereign Identity Digital Wallet: Extending the UTAUT with Trustworthiness, Fielding Graduate University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2021. 28716913.
[2] Lemoie, K., and Soares, L. (2020) Connected Impact: Unlocking Education and Workforce Opportunity Through Blockchain, American Council for Education, Office of Education Technology.
[3] Lemoie, K. (2022). Interoperability for Verifiable Learning and Employment Records, Medium.
[4[ Lemoie, K. (2021). The Future of Open Badges is Verifiable, Medium.
[5] Lemoie, K. (2016). The Open Badges Community is the Infrastructure. Medium.
