IT'S THE ITALIAN DIGITAL CREDENTIALING PLATFORM TO VALORIZE COMPETENCIES GROWING IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM AND CONNECT THEM WITH EMPLOYERS.

What competencies are implied by a degree course in Philosophy? How can the value of a specific degree be explained to an employer? How can the value of extracurricular activities, of research and collaboration be expressed? How can technology support students and academics in sharing their competencies with colleagues, companies and other institutions? How can one be sure of competencies and certifications declared in curricula without contacting every issuing institution?

Bestr proposes digital credentials: digital verifiable documents where the issuing organization describes a competency and how it has been acquired for a specific learner.

A digital credential is a visual and digital recommendation letter, to be inserted directly in one's own resumè.

University, research and territory - with a common language

Higher education, research and companies create a valuable ecosystem, constantly building the competencies useful to the country.

With Bestr's digital credentials, it is possible to describe such competencies, describe how they are build and assessed and allow those who need it to evaluate them efficiently and securely, leveraging assessments performed by other entities.

Beyond CV, before CV: Digital Credentials

Bestr allows going beyond the usual resumè, full of unverifiable claims, rarely read attachments and implicatoin that might not be clear to all readers. With digital credentials, training institutions and colleagues of a learner have a voice directly in his/her resumè, becoming testimonials of the learner in a digital precise shareable verifiable way.

There are many digital credentialing standards to describe competencies developed by learners and assessed by institutions, each with its own specificities in terms of security, verifiability, shareability, actual contents. According to the specific competency or certification that needs to be expressed, some standards can be better than others. Bestr supports different digital credentialing standards, all of them open.

Open Badge is a technological open standard, initiated by Mozilla Foundation (OBI - Open Badges Infrastructure) and developed by an active international community. The Open Badge standard is used all over the world in the most different organizations.

Open Badges look like images, readable by every computer, but those images also contain metadata about the competencies that each specific badge represents and about the person that owns it. Every badge is unique and, if read by a system that supports OBI, tells the story of its owner: name and surname, the date of acquisition, the competency that it represents, in which way this competency has been acquired and assessed, who assessed it and, in case, for how long that competency is valid. All verifiable in real time from every system supporting OBI.

An Open Badge has a strong communication power due to the visual component represented by the image. An Open Badge is portable because any system supporting the standard can read its metadata: thus it can be verified by calling upon the platform who issued it.

Open Badges have been the first standard adopted by Bestr to represent competencies.

Some competencies or titles are particularly relevant and need to be always easily and securely verifiable – even over a long period of time. This is why organizations on Bestr can issue Blockcerts besides Open Badges.

Blockcerts is an open standard designed by MIT Media Lab to digitally express a certificate and record it on a blockchain, so that it is always verifiable without any need to call for the issuing organization or platform.

The Blockcerts standard builds on the Open Badge 2.0 standard and connects it to blockchain technologies. Bestr writes its Blockcerts on the public Ethereum blockchain, using hashing and merkle-tree systems to ensure the lowest number of transactions and the highest level of privacy.

Bestr is the first italian platform implementing the Blockcerts standard. Thus Bestr becomes a Digital Credentialing System, where titles and competencies can be represented with the most apt digital tool. Blockcerts are available on Bestr since 2019, you can see all the issuing organizations in the Blockcerts Public Key Registry

Cineca is the main Italian interuniversity Consortium. It has been established in 1969 in order to be able to access to exceptional supercomputing resources inaccessible to the individual institution.

Cineca's mission is to provide the technological tools needed by the research and the structural development of Italy. Cineca now speaks to univerisities, research centers, business companies - and million of students, researchers, teachers and administrative assistants that are daily users of Cineca systems.

International studies underline the huge skill gap between the competencies required by the job market and the ones proved by the educational institutions. This is a main problem in many countries - especially Europe. Cineca took this into high consideration and identified in the digital credentialing system the tool that technology can provide to enable the interaction among relevant stakeholders.

This is how Bestr was born, the first italian platform for Digital Credentialing.