What’s in your digital wallet?
Community colleges that offer the ability to upload learning and employment records (LER) into a dashboard that some call a “digital wallet” provide their students the opportunity to present their credentials to any potential employer, anywhere, at any time. Yet adoption of these apps hasn’t gone as quickly or seamlessly as some in the sector have hoped.
To help spur their spread, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) has become involved in the LER Accelerator, launched in 2024 with support from Walmart. It’s an effort intended to boost the adoption of digital credentials, overcoming delays in implementation, fostering collaboration among associations such as AACC, and raising awareness among learners, educators, employers and colleges.
This article is an excerpt from the new issue of the Community College Journal, published bimonthly by the American Association of Community Colleges.
Digital credentials can be defined as digital representations of claims about a person, focused on their education and training experiences or capabilities. These digital wallets are portable, tamper-evident, data-rich and controlled by the learner themselves, which means they can access their own data anytime and share publicly at their discretion, says Kerri Lemoie, director of the Digital Credentials Consortium, a university-led group founded in 2018 and based at MIT that advocates for these systems.
“For issuers like colleges, universities and training providers, the cryptographic signature greatly reduces the prevalence of fraudulent credentials,” she says, adding that the consortium promotes the use of the W3C Verifiable Credentials [VC] web standard chosen by government agencies in the U.S. and abroad. “Generally speaking, VCs allow for the sharing of achievements across the web, quickly, securely, and with as much or as little detail as is determined by the owner of the data.”
She adds that, “unlike web-hosted badges which ‘live’ publicly on the web, information contained in a VC is only made public when the learner decides to share it. VCs are not stored on a central database which is at risk of being hacked. They are stored securely on the learner’s device.”
As a learner acquires skills that make them employable, the verification of these skills can be carried with them across their professional and academic lives, Lemoie says.
“This also addresses some logistical challenges of requesting degrees and transcripts, often for a fee, mitigating the time it takes to verify a credential like a degree or licensure,” she says. “It also means that the credential will be available to the learner, even if the issuing institution ceases to exist.”
Waiting to catch on
The Digital Credentials Consortium typically finds that students are excited by the concept, but it has not gained enough acceptance and recognition from employers to elicit a strong demand, Lemoie says.
“For educational institutions, the decision to shift to new platforms and software is multilateral, requiring buy-in from school administrators as well as IT personnel or even faculty. Larger institutions may have different governance approaches to degree-bearing vs. non-degree credentials,” she says. “Therefore, the shift to VCs requires a significant change management plan.”
To learn more about digital credentials and learning and employment records, Lemoie suggests the consortium’s wiki as well as the LER Ecosystem Map and the T3 LER Toolkit.
Indiana Achievement Wallet
Ivy Tech Community College, the statewide two-year college, has supported the development of a learner employment record called the Indiana Achievement Wallet, maintained through a vendor called iQ4. Associate Provost Rebecca Rahschulte says the wallet houses educational achievement and credentials as well as career pathway steps.
“It becomes, for that individual, a very personalized space where they can store their credentials, manage them, and showcase their skills and talents,” she says.
The Indiana Commission on Higher Education, which has had a robust partnership with a nonprofit called Credential Engine for many years, was at the forefront of thinking about what LERs could do for the state, Rahschulte says.
“They were pivotal in securing funding resources to make sure this is a tool we could have in Indiana,” she says, adding that the Lilly Endowment, Walmart Foundation, SkillsFWD and employers have contributed. Ivy Tech now sits on a thought leader group around the concept that includes Western Governors University, the Indiana Chamber, iQ4, Credential Engine, Purdue Global and Vincennes University, among other partners, she adds.
Wallet’s evolution
The first iteration of the wallet focused on post-completion scenarios in which students received a digital diploma through Parchment and could upload other credentials, Rahschulte says.
“We’re continuing to refine our mechanisms for promoting the wallet,” she says. “The open-and-click rates for that were not what we’d want them to be.”
So, Ivy Tech tried a program-specific approach focused on its School of Information Technology, based on research that showed IT majors were more likely to participate, which had modest success. However, Ivy Tech has decided to transition at this point to target the 90,000 high school students who take part in the college’s dual-credit programming statewide, Rahschulte says.
The school is also providing instructions to users on how to load digital badges with “microcredentials” that further flesh out users’ skills and achievements.
“Some of them are already earning industry short-term credentials in high school,” she says. “It’s an opportunity for a student at a young age to understand the value of the wallet. It also offers up the opportunity to strategize around, not just post-high-school employment, but also matriculation. We might have students who finish with us, as we’re starting to build course-level competencies into the wallet. They might be three or six hours away from earning a postsecondary credential. This can allow them to see how close they are, and prompt them to matriculate — to see how their shortterm credential is stackable.”
Rahschulte sees philosophical and technical benefits to the Indiana Achievement Wallet. “The LERs put the learning into context for a student. They start to understand the value of degrees,” she says. “They signal information about a student— not just a piece of paper, but what’s been learned, the skills and competencies that a student has mastered as a result of that particular credential. Then, taking that a step further, it gives insight into how those strengths and competencies, and, in turn, interest, help a student in navigating an aligned career.”
