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The use cases at hand can roughly be classified as follows:
- individuals Individuals as bearers Holders of credentials:
- presenting learning and education outcomes such as diploma , and skills across borders. This includes transcript of records, microcredentials or badges in order to support use case such as access to other education experiences (including mobility or at alliance partners), applying for jobs or getting registered into (or staying in) professional registers.
- presenting attestations of organisational affiliations and roles such as student, staff, alumni or org. units in order to get access to restricted resources such as buildings, libraries (including subscriptions and licensed content), discounted offers or acting on behalf of the issuing organisation.
- presenting entitlements/group membership/resource capabilities/ in order to support research infrastructures to make decision on user authorisation. Those use cases can be complex when research infrastructures and points of assigning the data describing the user rights are distributed over multiple locations/autonomous systems that can be cross border.
- base academic ID/core identity (PID)/: acting as glue between the two groups above, e.g. by providing appropriate (sectoral) identifiers.
- organisations Organisations as bearers Holders of credentials:
- embedding attestations such as (national) accreditations, scorings, ERASMUS participation, alliance membership, European university/degree, national accreditation as a university, listings or certification/compliance attestations in credentials issued to individuals in order to improve the value of the attestation to bearers or to enable them to act on their behalf.
- Research communities/infrastructures? organisations...
- Organisations as verifiers of credentials:
- inbound students
Transformative aspects
- ... (not) getting in contact with end-users
- Digital transformation of presenting learning and education outcomes:
- current: such documents are usually presented on paper - often with security elements - or as scans - where those security elements get lost. Verification of such documents involves human interaction, is quite costly and is only performed in case of suspected misuse. Some verification services exist, such as Switch Verify, but they are not standards based, offer differing sets of functionalities and did not reach substantial market coverage.
- transformed: such documents get offered as structured data in machine readable format with security elements to protect integrity, authenticity and trust. Verification can be automated, becomes cheap and can easily be performed on all documents presented that way.
- impact:
Efficiency: Moving from paper-based or scanned documents to structured data in machine-readable formats would greatly enhance efficiency. Automation of verification processes would reduce the need for human intervention, thereby saving time and resources. Institutions would be able to handle a larger volume of documents with greater speed and accuracy.
Cost Reduction: Automation of verification processes would lead to cost reduction. Institutions would no longer need to allocate significant resources to manually verify documents. Additionally, the costs associated with paper-based documentation (printing, storage, etc.) would decrease. Quote by Dutch government based on their impact assessment (incoming students (not) going through the identification process resulting in a 1.7M€ savings - we believe the societal benefit to be much higher)
Accuracy & Reliability: Machine-readable formats with embedded security elements would enhance the accuracy and reliability of educational documents. The risk of tampering or forgery would be significantly reduced, increasing trust in the authenticity of the presented documents.
Accessibility & Global Reach: The adoption of standards for presenting educational documents in machine-readable formats would promote consistency and interoperability across institutions and systems. This standardisation would streamline processes and enhance collaboration within the education sector. Digital transformation would enable educational documents to be easily verified across borders, eliminating geographical barriers. This would facilitate international mobility and recognition of qualifications, promoting global collaboration and exchange in the education sector
- Match-making processes get much easier - moving the interest towards microcredentials (compared to the "big" diplomas) and e-assessment adds to this
- For NRENs: the move from "identities only" to "learning as well" and probably also to offering "portfolios"
- For universities: impact on the selection/onboarding processes valuing also non-formal results and "portfolio" information
- Scope of identity services of our community:
- current: existing identity services such as eduGAIN are used for online access to resources, but not directly for presentation of documents. Therefore, such services are only relevant to services being accessed by users.
- transformed: Emerging new identity services of our community extend beyond online resource access to include the secure presentation of documents, broadening their utility and scope.
- impact: a much larger number of services - called verifier - coming from a wider range of sectors outside of our own research and education sector will rely on our emerging identity services. To enable trust in our emerging services and the players in our own sector, we can no longer rely on implicit trust in our sector, but have to make it explicit to other parties. This might include elements like certifications, practice statements and sector governance. The information is coming from different trust domains.
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