The Open Badges Bestr (https://bestr.it/organization/show/126) have been adopted and promoted by the Language Centre with the support of the University of Cagliari in order to offer secure, portable, detailed, speaking digital certificates to its students.  

The Open Badges for English language show the competencies acquired by the students in each learning step of the Project, automatically recognizing them in their university career.  

Understanding and verifying the value of the competencies will be easier for a perspective employer or an institution thanks to digitals credentials. 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. 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. 

Blockcerts is a digital document containing all the information of the certificate, but it is not completely saved on the blockchain.  

It is the digital fingerprint of the document (hash) which is saved on blockchain. In this way, the owner of the document can compute its digital fingertip and verify that it matches what is recorded on blockchain.  

International studies underline the huge skill gap between the competencies required by the job market and the ones proved by 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.