representing issuer chains eg (Coursera > Stanford University > Intro to Gamification > Professor K

[threeqube]

From @brianloveswords

When I got credit for my Advanced Creative Writing course, the bodies that implicitly validated the learning are:

• The University of Connecticut
  • College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • The English department
    • The Creative Writing department
    • My professor (Ellen Litman) In this case, I'd likely want to put "University of Connecticut" as the issuer, but that does end up obfuscating a lot of relevant data. I think point #3 that Jarin makes is a good one, we might need some way of representing issuer chains.

From Jarin Schmidt at Pearson:

Imagine Coursera wants to issue badges for course completion. Who would end up in the "Issuer" portion of the assertion? Would it be Coursera, because they facilitated the learning and created / distributed the physical badge? Would it be the professor, because they determined an achievement was met? Or, would it be the University the professor is associated with, so that their brand is recognized? In our world, we have a lot of use-cases like this where all of the stakeholders are "accountable" for the issuance, and therefore have a legitimate claim to be included in the issuer metadata. I have imagined it playing out in three ways:

• Criteria and perhaps standards URL point back to the University, the platform that issues the badge is the issuer and the professor would be an endorser?
• The issuer is always the product that creates and distributes the badge and everything else is handled in some way through endorsements.
• We need the ability to offer issuer "chains," so all stakeholders are given equal credit.

[iamjessklein]

This is a good point, so when you have collaborative issuers - you need some way of surfacing that data in the specification.

[jonkruithof]

In the case above, wouldn't normal implicit relationships be the standard? For example, if I'm talking about a course in a face-to face context, I'd say it was taught by Dr. Ellen Litman, at the University of Connecticut - so wouldn't similar syntax be for the issuer (Dr. Ellen Litman, University of Connecticut)? In the case of branded higher education, it could be multiple issuers? Or once endorsements get sorted out, maybe it's the individual assessor (Dr. Ellen Litman), with the badge endorsed by the University of Connecticut.