Re: EOCred: cost of a credential

+1 to using Offer and trying to stick pretty close to its prototypical
usage. +1 to keeping our recommendation as simple as possible here, even if
we can't handle every use case.

>From my team's experience, the most compelling use cases are ones where
there are clear direct costs associate with the credential. That applies to
a credential where you pay for the assessment and to credentials awarded as
part of a course with direct costs.

I like the idea of investigating AggregateOffer, though we may find our
desire to present "An estimated total of direct and typical indirect costs
of obtaining a credential.

There are two different ways implementation of cost could fail to produce a
useful ecosystem. (a) implementation doesn't cover enough % of the
credentials in a market niche to give users enough data to meaningfully
compare credentials, which could be exacerbated if we target too narrow a
slice of use cases. Or, (b), we achieve enough implementation to compare by
including less specific data and/or more complicated/varied data structures
to describe a broad range of estimated costs that might potentially be
related to the credential ("The estimated February 2018 cost of 20 gallons
of gasoline for commuting to class") that it's impossible to get any useful
comparison between credentials.

I think think (a) is inevitable: most credentials won't have published
prices - Issuers can serve their use cases without defining that property
themselves most of the time. So we'll have to build our ecosystem to focus
more on usable offer data when it exists versus meaningful comparison of
rough costs between credentials, I think. And I would be excited about
focusing on this direction, because the use cases it enables action on
produce a much more meaningful action "I know how to access this offer"
versus the rough comparison use cases "I now have a little bit more
information to help me choose between potential credentials I might
pursue".

*Nate Otto*
*Director, Open Badges, Concentric Sky*
concentricsky.com
he/him/his