The hottest thing in higher ed is MOOC. And one of the hottest MOOC platforms is Coursera.

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There are couple of challenges the MOOC movement is about to run into:

  1. How do we know that the person submitting a test is the same person she claimed to be before? Identity proofing in a self-declared identity environment is not trivial. MOOCs are by definition open
  2. If we want to make money, we better be able to give credits (or badges, or certificates, or a university degree, or something similar). Solutions include test submission with identity proofing.

Then comes the scary part: Coursera offers a Signature Track, where you as a student get identity verification, verified certificates and sharable course records. This is innovative and new. And the way they do it scares me because of the implications for the student and for other services online (biometric unique typing pattern). There is a Signature Track Guidebook with more details

The unique typing pattern is used to identify your work

“Signature Phrase, a biometric profile of your unique typing pattern. Every time you submit coursework, you’ll easily authenticate your identity by typing your Signature Phrase.”

If this is really workable, I am not sure I want to use any cloud service (like WordPress for this blog, or Gmail) where I type in text. Selling the unique typing patterns for their 2.8 million learners would, however, probably fund the company for the rest of its natural life. It also opens a whole new game of trust issues for any of us using online services. So far the typing part is only available on PC/Mac, and not on tablets

Hopefully I am wrong to be scared.

We need to find a better way to do identity proofing.