Re: Seeking to update Decentralized Identity related slides

On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 4:25 PM Challener, David C. <
David.Challener@jhuapl.edu> wrote:

> I don’t like this use case because I don’t think it is really viable.
>
> The university will not want to be disintermediated from its alumni.
>
> The university will not want to make its alumni angry.
>
> The university will not want to give up the money they make when they give
> out transcripts.
>
>
>
> I just checked the U. of Ill. Technique and it is really easy to get a
> transcript, so it isn’t clear there is a problem that needs to be solved
> here anyway.
>

The story of my experience with educational institutions is quite different.

I taught for 5 years at Bainbridge Graduate Institute (bgi.edu), in a
sustainable (aka "green") MBA program. Over 200 alumni of my classes paid
in excess of $60-90K to get their MBAs from an accredited school.

However, in the years since they changed their name to Pinchot.edu, and due
to rules about .edu had to relinquish the bgi.edu name.  All old email
addresses, including my own don't work. No forwarding is allowed by the
.edu gTLD. If X.509 certificates had been issued the too probably would no
longer function.

Worse, more recently the school as a whole was "acquired" by Presidio.edu,
which has a different executive and academic leadership team. So once
again, all email & certificates for Pinchot.edu nee BGI.edu are invalid. In
fact, someone now has somehow poached the Pinchot.edu name and it redirects
to a commercial website. Despite being a former teacher of BGI,
Presidio.edu will not give me an email address unless I am a current
teacher, current student, or graduated alumni. Thus I can no longer respond
to a variety of academic documents as well as alumni requests. Fortunately,
those who need it can still find me.

Presidio is rumored to be in financial trouble, so yet again all my
students will become digital refugees if the world wants a digital
credential for their MBAs. Yet the students did the work, met the
requirements, paid for the work, the institution(s) themselves at the time
of graduation were properly accredited, etc.

As the education industry is increasingly going through a transition and/or
disintermediation, these type of incidents will only become more common.
Education credentials with various timestamps demonstrating that the
credentials were valid when issued I believe are an important use case.

-- Christopher Allen