EdTech Glossary

Think of a Skill Passport the way you think of a travel passport. A travel passport proves who you are and where you've been; a Skill Passport proves what you know and what you've done. Unlike a traditional transcript — a static PDF issued by one institution for one narrow purpose — a Skill Passport grows with the learner, accumulating achievements from every corner of their life: classroom projects, coding competitions, volunteering, sports leadership, and industry certifications.

The critical distinction is ownership. A school transcript is owned and controlled by the school. A Skill Passport belongs to the student. When a learner graduates, changes schools, or moves countries, their Skill Passport travels with them. They can share it via a link, embed it in a college application, or present a QR code to a scholarship committee — and any recipient can instantly verify every item in it without calling a registrar's office.

What goes inside a Skill Passport? The contents span four categories: (1) Verified credentials — digital certificates and Open Badges issued by schools, training providers, or platforms; (2) Attested achievements — experiences confirmed by a teacher or mentor via teacher attestation; (3) Self-authored evidence — portfolio artefacts like project write-ups, videos, or reflections; and (4) Competency records drawn from a Comprehensive Learner Record.

Why does this matter now? Universities increasingly use holistic admissions — they want to see more than grades. Employers, especially for early-career roles and internships, ask for proof of skills, not just degrees. A Skill Passport gives students a competitive advantage by making achievements visible, portable, and instantly trustworthy. For a practical example, a student who won a state-level robotics competition can have that victory attested by their teacher and added as a verified entry — something no traditional transcript would ever capture.

SkillStory's Skill Passport is built on open standards — Open Badges 3.0 and the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model — so it works across every platform and institution that recognises those standards, not just inside a proprietary walled garden.

Related terms: CLR, Open Badge, Verifiable Credential, Attestation

The Comprehensive Learner Record is one of the most important emerging standards in education technology, yet most students and parents have never heard of it. In simple terms, a CLR is a digital "super-transcript" — one that goes far beyond a list of course grades to include extracurricular achievements, competency levels, work-based learning, badges, and other records that traditional transcripts ignore.

What makes the CLR powerful is its structure. The 1EdTech CLR Standard (version 2.0) defines an exact data model, so a CLR issued by one institution can be read, verified, and displayed by any system that supports the standard. A university admissions platform built in Japan can parse a CLR issued by a high school in Brazil — without manual translation or PDF uploads. This interoperability is the point.

What does a CLR contain? A CLR is composed of Achievements and Associations. Achievements describe what the learner accomplished — a course completion, a competency mastered, a badge earned, or an activity led. Associations describe the relationships between achievements, such as how a set of micro-credentials adds up to a certificate programme. Each achievement can carry a result (the grade or score), a description of the criteria, and a link to the issuing organisation.

CLR vs. transcript: A traditional transcript is a PDF. It cannot be machine-verified. It cannot be automatically parsed by an admissions system. And it only captures what happened inside a classroom. A CLR captures life's full learning picture — inside and outside school — in a format that software can read, verify, and act on.

Example: A student completes a community leadership programme run by a local NGO, earns three micro-credentials from an online learning platform, and receives two teacher attestations for project work. A CLR bundles all of this alongside the student's academic courses into a single verified document — a complete picture that no university application form, résumé, or traditional transcript could capture.

SkillStory's Skill Passport is CLR-compliant, meaning every achievement stored inside it follows the 1EdTech standard. This ensures that records created today remain readable and portable for years — even as the platforms students use change throughout their lives.

Related terms: Skill Passport, Open Badge, Micro-credential

The Open Badges specification was originally developed by Mozilla in 2011 and is now stewarded by 1EdTech (formerly IMS Global). The central insight was simple: digital images that look like merit badges can carry their own proof. Instead of trusting that a certificate is authentic because it looks official, anyone can inspect an Open Badge's embedded metadata to see exactly who issued it, for what achievement, under what criteria, and on what date.

How it works: When a learner earns an Open Badge, the issuing platform bakes metadata directly into the PNG or SVG image file or links it to a hosted assertion URL. That metadata includes: the Issuer (the school or organisation), the Achievement Definition (what the badge represents), the Criteria (what the earner had to do), the Evidence (optional links to proof), and the Recipient (identified cryptographically so the badge cannot be transferred to someone else).

Open Badges 3.0 (the current version) integrates with the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard, which means Open Badges can now be cryptographically signed by the issuer and independently verified without contacting the issuing platform. This makes them far more robust than earlier versions — even if a school's platform shuts down, the badge remains verifiable.

Examples in practice: A chemistry teacher awards an Open Badge for a student's first-place entry in a science fair. A coding bootcamp issues a badge for completing a Python course. A scout leader issues a badge for a community service milestone. In each case, the earner can share the badge to LinkedIn, embed it in a college application, or include it in their Skill Passport — and any viewer can verify it in seconds.

Why "Open"? The word open means the standard is publicly documented and free to implement. Any institution, business, or platform can issue or consume Open Badges without paying licensing fees. This openness is what enables the global portability and longevity that makes badges genuinely valuable.

Related terms: Verifiable Credential, Digital Credential, Micro-credential, CLR

The W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model is a web standard that defines how digital claims should be structured, signed, and shared. The goal is to make digital documents as trustworthy as physical documents with signatures and seals — but far more convenient. A university employer can check whether a degree is legitimate in milliseconds, without calling the registrar, without PDF uploads, and without any risk of a forged certificate slipping through.

The three-party model: Every Verifiable Credential involves three roles. The Issuer creates and signs the credential — for example, a school issuing a "Completed Grade 10" credential. The Holder stores the credential in a digital wallet and decides when and with whom to share it — that is the student. The Verifier receives the credential and checks the cryptographic signature to confirm it is genuine — that is the university admissions office or employer.

What makes it tamper-evident? Each Verifiable Credential carries a digital signature generated using public-key cryptography. If anyone alters even a single character in the credential after it has been signed, the signature check fails. The verifier does not need to trust the holder's word — or even the credential's appearance — because the mathematics makes forgery computationally infeasible.

Example: A student earns a certificate from an online science programme. The programme issues a Verifiable Credential signed with the programme's private key. The student stores it in their Skill Passport. When they apply to university, they share the credential. The admissions system checks the signature against the programme's published public key — all in under a second — and confirms the credential is authentic.

SkillStory's platform issues all credentials as Verifiable Credentials compliant with both the W3C standard and Open Badges 3.0, so they can be verified by any compliant platform worldwide.

Related terms: Open Badge, Digital Credential, Learner Identity

Anyone can claim anything on a résumé. Attestation exists to solve this problem. When a trusted person — someone with professional standing and a verified identity on the platform — formally confirms that a student led a community project, mastered a software skill, or demonstrated a particular character trait, that confirmation becomes a permanent, verifiable part of the student's record. The attestor's identity and the date of the attestation are locked into the entry.

How attestation differs from a certificate: A certificate says a learner completed a course. An attestation says a specific person witnessed a specific event or behaviour. The two are complementary. A student might earn a certificate for completing a first aid course and then receive an attestation from their school nurse confirming they applied those skills during a real emergency. Together, the certificate and attestation tell a far richer story.

Who can attest? Attestors are typically credentialed individuals with an institutional relationship to the learner: classroom teachers, school counsellors, coaches, club mentors, internship supervisors, or community leaders. On SkillStory, attestors receive a unique link to review a student's claim, confirm it, and digitally sign the attestation — all within a few minutes, entirely online. Learn more on the Attestation feature page.

Attestation and trust: The value of an attestation scales with the credibility of the attestor. An attestation from a respected school principal carries more weight than one from a peer. SkillStory allows learners to build a portfolio of attestations from multiple credible sources, creating a composite picture of their character, capability, and growth that no standardised test could ever produce.

Example: A student spent a summer helping elderly residents in their neighbourhood with technology. They self-report this in their Skill Passport. Their local librarian, who supervised the sessions, signs an attestation confirming the activity, dates, and skills demonstrated. This transforms a self-claim into a verified experience that universities and scholarship panels can trust.

Related terms: Teacher Attestation, Verified Skills, Skill Passport

The credential fraud problem is real. Employers and universities regularly encounter fake degrees, fabricated transcripts, and borrowed certificates. The root cause is that traditional credentials are not bound to an individual in a way that can be independently verified. A PDF certificate with a person's name on it proves nothing about whether that person actually earned it.

Learner Identity solves this by anchoring credentials to a verified individual. When a learner creates an account on a credentialing platform, they go through an identity verification step — typically email confirmation, phone verification, or in higher-stakes contexts, document-based identity verification. From that point, every credential issued to that account is cryptographically bound to that verified identity. No one else can claim those credentials.

Why persistence matters: A learner's identity cannot change every time they switch schools, graduate, or change email addresses. A robust Learner Identity persists across institutions and across time. The same identity that receives an Open Badge at age 14 for a robotics achievement can present a verified degree at age 24 — and the recipient institution can confirm both records link to the same authenticated person.

Decentralised identifiers (DIDs): The emerging frontier of Learner Identity uses W3C Decentralised Identifiers — cryptographic identifiers that a learner controls, not an institution. This means a learner's identity cannot be revoked by a third party. It travels with them regardless of which platforms, schools, or employers they interact with throughout their life.

In SkillStory's model, every Skill Passport is built on a verified Learner Identity, so that every Verifiable Credential and attestation stored inside it is provably linked to the same person — for life.

Related terms: Verifiable Credential, Digital Credential, Skill Passport

The ePortfolio concept dates back to the late 1990s but has become dramatically more important as hiring and admissions processes move online. Where a CV lists achievements in text, an ePortfolio shows them — through project files, videos, written reflections, photographs of physical work, code repositories, or design mockups. The difference is the difference between telling someone you can cook and inviting them to taste the food.

ePortfolio vs. Skill Passport: These terms overlap but are distinct. An ePortfolio is primarily about presentation — the curated, audience-facing display of selected work. A Skill Passport is the underlying verified record — the full, cryptographically secure ledger of achievements. Think of the Skill Passport as the vault and the ePortfolio as the showcase window. Many platforms, including SkillStory, combine both: the portfolio presents the work compellingly, while the Skill Passport provides the independent verification that makes it trustworthy.

Types of ePortfolios: A learning portfolio documents the process of learning — drafts, revisions, and reflections that show how a student grew. A showcase portfolio presents the best finished work. An assessment portfolio is used by educators to evaluate student progress against specific learning objectives. Most student ePortfolios in practice are showcase-oriented, curated for a specific audience.

What makes an ePortfolio effective? Three things: evidence, context, and verification. Evidence is the actual work or documentation. Context is the learner's explanation of what they did, why it mattered, and what they learned. Verification is the third-party confirmation — the teacher attestation, the badge, the credential — that makes the evidence trustworthy. An ePortfolio without verification is just self-promotion; one with verification is a powerful, credible professional document.

SkillStory's Portfolio & Showcase feature lets students build a shareable ePortfolio directly from their verified Skill Passport entries — so every piece of evidence in the portfolio is already backed by independent verification.

Related terms: Student Portfolio, Skill Passport, Verified Skills

The phrase "proficient in Microsoft Excel" appears on millions of résumés. Almost none of those claims have been verified. Employers know this, which is why unverified skill claims have low credibility. Verified Skills are the antidote: they carry proof that an independent, credible party has assessed the learner against defined criteria and confirmed the skill exists at the claimed level.

Methods of verification: Skills can be verified through multiple pathways. A competency assessment tests the skill directly — a coding challenge, a written exam, or a practical demonstration. An attestation from a teacher or employer confirms the skill was observed in practice. A credential or badge issued by a recognised authority (a school, certification body, or online learning platform) serves as third-party validation. The most credible verified skill entries combine more than one method.

Verified Skills vs. self-reported skills: LinkedIn lets anyone list any skill and ask colleagues to "endorse" it with a click — no evidence required. The resulting endorsements carry very little signal. By contrast, a Verified Skill on a credentialing platform is backed by documented evidence and a signed confirmation. Employers increasingly distinguish between these two types of claims when screening candidates.

Skill taxonomies: For Verified Skills to be meaningful across contexts, the skills themselves need to be described in a common language. Frameworks such as ESCO (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations) or O*NET in the US provide standardised skill vocabularies. When a verified skill uses a recognised taxonomy term, it is legible to employers, universities, and automated systems worldwide — not just within the platform that issued it.

SkillStory stores Verified Skills inside a learner's Skill Passport, each backed by the evidence, attestation, or credential that validated it — creating a trustworthy skill profile that travels with the learner throughout their career.

Related terms: Attestation, Digital Credential, Career Readiness

"Digital credential" is the broad umbrella term under which all the more specific credential types — Open Badges, Verifiable Credentials, CLR achievements, and micro-credentials — all sit. If a credential is issued, stored, and shared digitally and carries embedded metadata that allows its authenticity to be checked, it is a digital credential.

The evolution from paper to digital: For most of the 20th century, credentials existed as physical documents — paper certificates, embossed diplomas, laminated licences. These were difficult to forge but also difficult to verify quickly, easy to lose, and impossible to share at scale. Digital credentials solve all three problems: they can be shared with a link, verified in milliseconds, and cannot be forged without breaking a cryptographic signature.

What differentiates a good digital credential? Several properties matter. Portability — can the earner take it with them regardless of which platform issued it? Verifiability — can any recipient independently confirm it is genuine? Longevity — will the credential remain verifiable in ten years even if the issuing platform no longer exists? Richness — does it carry enough context (criteria, evidence, issuer identity) to be meaningful? Good digital credentials, especially those following open standards, score highly on all four.

Industry adoption: Digital credentials are now issued by universities, professional associations, government bodies, and online learning platforms in every sector. The Google Career Certificates programme, Microsoft certifications, and AWS cloud credentials are all well-known examples. But digital credentials are equally important in K–12 education — where SkillStory operates — recognising achievements that paper transcripts miss entirely.

Every credential issued through SkillStory's platform — whether for a school project, an extra-curricular activity, or an accredited course — is a standards-compliant digital credential that learners can carry in their Verified Credentials portfolio forever.

Related terms: Open Badge, Verifiable Credential, Micro-credential, CLR

Teachers spend more time with students than almost any other adult. They observe growth, effort, character, and capability in ways that no test score can capture. Teacher Attestation is built on this insight: by giving teachers a formal, digital mechanism to confirm what they have witnessed, it elevates the teacher's professional judgment into a permanent, verifiable credential.

What can teachers attest? Almost any observable achievement or experience. A chemistry teacher can attest that a student demonstrated laboratory safety skills. An English teacher can attest that a student delivered a compelling oral presentation. A PE teacher can attest consistent sportsmanship. A form tutor can attest sustained community service. In each case, the teacher is not just writing a letter of reference — they are creating a signed digital record that travels with the student forever.

How the process works on SkillStory: A student logs an achievement in their Skill Passport and requests attestation from their teacher. The teacher receives an email with a link to the student's claim, reviews the description, optionally adds their own notes, and signs the attestation digitally. The entire process takes under five minutes. The resulting record is cryptographically linked to the teacher's verified account and permanently stored in the student's Skill Passport.

Why this matters for students: University admissions and scholarship panels routinely ask for teacher references. Those references currently live in email threads and PDF letters that cannot be independently verified. A Teacher Attestation in a Skill Passport replaces that paper-based system with a portable, verifiable digital record. The teacher does the work once; the student benefits from it indefinitely.

Example: A Year 11 student leads the school's Model UN team to a regional final. Her teacher attests the achievement, noting her leadership, public speaking, and research skills. She includes the attestation in her university application alongside her academic transcript — giving admissions tutors verified evidence of the qualities they care about most but rarely see documented. Read more about how Attestation works on SkillStory.

Related terms: Attestation, Verified Skills, Skill Passport

The student portfolio concept is not new — art students have carried physical portfolios of their work to admissions interviews for generations. What is new is the ability to build a digital student portfolio that is verified, shareable, and growing continuously throughout a student's school years, not assembled in a panic the week before an application deadline.

Student Portfolio vs. ePortfolio: These terms are often used interchangeably, and rightly so — a student portfolio is typically digital in modern contexts, making it an ePortfolio. The distinction, where it exists, is audience and purpose. "Student portfolio" tends to emphasise the K–12 or undergraduate context and the educational progression it documents, while "ePortfolio" is broader, used across education and professional settings.

What belongs in a student portfolio? The best portfolios are selective and purposeful, not exhaustive dumps of everything the student has ever done. They typically include: significant academic projects (especially interdisciplinary or extended work), evidence of leadership and initiative (clubs, competitions, community involvement), credentials and awards, written reflections that show self-awareness and growth, and — critically — verified attestations and credentials that give every entry credibility.

Building it continuously: The strategic advantage of a student portfolio comes from building it over years, not weeks. A student who adds verified entries from Year 7 onwards arrives at their university application with a rich, longitudinal record of growth. They can demonstrate not just what they achieved but how they developed over time — a far more compelling narrative than a list of last-minute achievements.

SkillStory's Portfolio & Showcase feature lets students build and share a beautiful, verified student portfolio directly from their Skill Passport — with every entry backed by a teacher attestation, badge, or verified credential.

Related terms: ePortfolio, Skill Passport, Career Readiness

Employers, governments, and educators increasingly agree that degrees and grades alone do not reliably predict workplace success. Career Readiness is the framework that attempts to identify what actually does. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) in the US, for example, defines eight core career readiness competencies: critical thinking, communication, teamwork, digital literacy, leadership, professionalism, career management, and equity and inclusion.

What makes career readiness "measurable"? This is where credentialing technology becomes important. A student can claim to be "a strong communicator" on their CV. But career readiness is measurable when it is demonstrated through verifiable evidence — an attestation from a teacher confirming debate leadership, a credential from a public speaking programme, a portfolio of written work, or a verified internship record. These artefacts transform a subjective claim into an evidenced, trustworthy signal.

Career readiness is built over time: It is not a switch that flips at graduation. Students who build verified records of projects, leadership roles, volunteer work, and workplace experiences throughout their school years arrive at the labour market with demonstrable career readiness — not just a degree certificate. This is precisely why the Skill Passport model is so well-suited to career readiness: it aggregates these experiences continuously, in a format that employers and universities can trust.

The credential gap: Research consistently shows that employers believe graduates lack workplace readiness, while graduates themselves feel prepared. This perception gap exists largely because graduates cannot demonstrate their readiness with verified, specific evidence. A strong career readiness profile — built from verified skills, attested experiences, and documented projects — closes this gap by giving employers concrete proof rather than generic claims.

SkillStory's platform is designed with career readiness as a core outcome. Every verified skill, teacher attestation, and digital credential stored in a student's Skill Passport is a building block of a career readiness profile that speaks directly to what employers and admissions officers actually want to see.

Related terms: Verified Skills, Student Portfolio, Micro-credential

The rise of micro-credentials reflects a fundamental shift in how learning and employment are connected. Traditional education moves in large, slow units — a degree takes three or four years. The labour market moves in months. Micro-credentials fill the gap: a learner can develop and certify a specific, job-relevant skill in hours, days, or weeks, keeping pace with the speed at which industries evolve.

What qualifies as a micro-credential? The term lacks a single regulatory definition, but strong micro-credentials share several characteristics. They are specific — certifying one defined skill or competency, not a broad subject. They are assessed — the learner must demonstrate competency, not just complete a course. They are portable — issued as a digital credential or Open Badge that travels with the learner. And ideally they are stackable — multiple micro-credentials can combine toward a certificate, diploma, or even a degree.

Micro-credentials in K–12 education: The micro-credential model is not just for adult learners and professionals. Schools and educational programmes increasingly issue micro-credentials to students for mastering specific competencies — a data literacy micro-credential for completing a statistics unit, a first aid certification, or a leadership micro-credential for running a school club. These early-career micro-credentials are powerful additions to a student portfolio, demonstrating initiative and specific skills that a traditional transcript never captures.

Stackability in practice: A student might earn micro-credentials in Python basics, data analysis, and machine learning fundamentals from three different providers. Collectively, these stack toward a recognised data science competency that is meaningful to a university admissions office or early-career employer — even though no single institution issued a full qualification. The CLR standard is specifically designed to aggregate these stacks into a coherent, machine-readable record.

Quality signals: Not all micro-credentials are created equal. The credibility of a micro-credential depends on the credibility of its issuer, the rigour of its assessment, and whether it follows recognised standards such as Open Badges or W3C Verifiable Credentials. SkillStory ensures every credential stored in a learner's Skill Passport is standards-compliant and independently verifiable — so micro-credentials carry the trust they deserve.

Related terms: Digital Credential, Open Badge, CLR, Career Readiness