There are nearly one million credentials offered in the United States by various education, training, licensing, and certification organizations. Unfortunately, there is too little transparency about these credentials and their value. Credential Engine is a non-profit focused on bringing transparency to the credentials landscape.
Credential transparency supports student success by making information about credentials public, easily accessible, and actionable. This transparency would ensure that credentials are better understood and pursued based on what it takes to earn them, what they represent, and the jobs they can lead. Given the scale and richness of the credential landscape, information needs to be combined from many different sources, different types of systems, and different data structures. Consequently, the Credential Engine aggregates comprehensive, open, searchable, and comparable credential data from providers using an open standard metadata structure, the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL).
CTDL is an open-source, humanly readable, and machine-actionable schema, or metadata language, for describing credentials and their related information on the public web. It provides a linked open data structure for over 700 characteristics related to credentials. CTDL also supports the development of new tools, searches, and services.
Furthermore, Credential Engine supports an open, public, freely available registry that aggregates and organizes CTDL metadata. Any organization with authority over credential-related information can increase credential transparency by publishing CTDL to the registry. This would enable stakeholders to catalog, organize, and compare credentials so that it is openly available for anyone, anytime, anywhere to understand credentials.
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