Open Community Approach/Open Certification Management

Open Certification Management is a generalization of the concept of OpenSource and OpenContent to other collaborative effort of educational institutions for mutual acceptance of digital certificates. The term “open” for an Open Certification Management refers to the opportunity for anyone to join and contribute to the collaborative effort of certified learning resources. The direction and goals are determined collaboratively by all members of the community of educational insitutions. While the standards assigned to the certificate are defined by the educational unit. The resulting product is an Open Certification Infrastructure made available under a free license, so that other communities can adapt and build on them.

Application of Standards

• To avoid that institutions set standards for a certificate but do follow these standards during the assessment and issuing of standards, a partial reassessment of the standards of certificate owners is possible due to the open standards assigned to the certificate.
• The trust in a specific issuing institution of certificates is dependent of the previous history of quality assurances in that institution. The Open Certification Management and the implementation of infrastructure assures that a certificate was really issued by a specific institution.
• Open Educational Resources show transparently the material the learning process for the certificate is based on and allows other institutions to build there own certificates on these learning resource.