The MIT presented Digital Diploma, a pilot program that offers students the possibility of getting their certifications in their smartphones through an application that uses blockchain technology.

 The app Blockcerts Wallet helps students get a verifiable manipulations proof version of their diploma, with the goal of showing it to companies and other schools. The institution reported that this year 111 graduates became the first to get their digital diploma.

For the development of technology, the MIT partnered with Learning Machine, a software company based in Massachusetts.

“MIT and its partner, Learning Machine, use blockchain to protect and verify the diploma. This is the same technology that enables Bitcoin to be safe and decentralized. The coded diploma is sent by email as an attached file to be stored in a safe place according to the graduate’s choice, who can also save and check his/her diploma in the mobile app”.

Digital certifications are not new, and most education platforms, such as Coursera, edX and Udacity, offer them. However, the MIT claims that its program is innovative as it grants autonomy to its students.

“From the beginning, one of our main motivations has been to empower students so they can control their credits. This pilot enables them to own their registries and share them is a safe way in whatever way they choose”, said Mary Callahan, head of the MIT Register Office.

The idea of using blockchain to promote a certifications system came from Callahan, who thought that this can provide durability and high security standards, and Philipp Schmidt, director of innovation and learning of the MIT Media Lab, who had already experimented with this technology.

Then, Schmidt’s team and Learning Machine started working together to build the pilot program.

“It was the perfect union: technology developed at MIT and a supplier that knows MIT as a community that appreciates learning, in a moment that full documentation of learning was a necessity”, said Callahan.

Chris Jagers, cofounder and CEO of Learning Machine, pointed out that, even though there are several kinds of blockchains, they chose Bitcoin because it prioritizes security over speed or cost. One of the key benefits for students is that they can prove to their employers or other schools that they have an MIT diploma. And the organization can verify the authenticity of the certificate through a website that “uses blockchain, locating the ID of the transaction (that identifies when the digital register was added to the blockchain), verifying and confirming that nothing has been altered of added”.

The team plans to expand the pilot to other MIT programs and, in the near future, it might be possible to link credentials and degrees from different institutions to a new meta-register.

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