The Relevance of Shared Credential Verification Ecosystems for Learners

Gerd Kortemeyer, Rectorate and AI Center, ETH Zürich

Gerd Kortemeyer, Rectorate and AI Center, ETH Zürich

What are some of the recent technological developments or trends in the education sector, and how are they impacting the learners?

One of the most significant developments in recent years has been the globalisation of education. Many educational experiences are scattered across many countries and continents, and institutions have started partnering across borders to facilitate a more diverse learning experience. Even though institutions are standardising the educational curriculum to enhance the learner experience, there are still many gaps that need to be addressed. One of them is that the credentials and degrees provided by the institutions cannot be shared and verified easily between different universities.

The need for easy exchange of verifiable credentials is therefore becoming more glaring every day. A learner’s journey goes from elementary school to college and, in some cases, a master’s degree. During this time, they acquire new skills from their education, work for several years, get additional credentials in their name, and change jobs frequently to gain more skills and credentials. Despite these efforts, they cannot easily convey the value of their credentials and certifications without verification to a new university.

To solve this problem, we need ecosystems that can facilitate seamless transfer of credentials and certificates between universities. For instance, as a university, we get thousands of applications for a particular master’s degree, which keeps everyone busy trying to figure out which university the students are from or if the submitted documents are genuine. So, a suitable platform will be able to sort through all the documents and choose the right candidates based on the value of their credentials and certifications.

Do you think recruiters, employers, and educational institutions benefit from verifiable credentials?

It is a labour-intensive process for the staff to go through all the scanned PDFs and the paper-based enrolling documents every year during the application season. With a digital system that could automatically verify the credentials, universities would be able to eliminate much of their manual workflow and focus on enhancing the learning experience of their students.

“There is also a competition for cloud solutions in the industry, which is a struggle for us at the moment. There are privacy laws in European countries where universities cannot use cloud services for any assessment or content distribution.”

The education sector, however, has many hurdles in the way of technology adoption, especially when it comes to the cloud. The privacy laws in European countries prevent universities from using most any cloud services for any assessment or content distribution in the academic fields.

If implemented, verifiable credentials and the associated concept of self-sovereign identity will enable learners to connect to cloud services using decentralised identifiers – only the university knows who they really are. With verifiable credentials issued to the students, they will become the connecting point between an external cloud service and the cloud agent and facilitate secure and seamless exchange of credentials. Exchanging data that preserves privacy and data security will also give advantages to smaller universities that may not offer significant degree programs but have a valid cloud portfolio. The verifiable credentials will establish a peer-to-peer marketplace and provide a fairer chance for everyone to interact on a global level in the educational ecosystem.

As Director of Educational Development and Technology, what are the key initiatives you are taking at your institution to implement verifiable credentials?

We are exploring different technologies for implementing verifiable credentials in our university. In this regard, we are working with other Swiss universities and trying to get a one-year exploratory project between industry partners and SWITCH Edu-ID. SWITCH Edu-ID is a centralized digital identity for lifelong access to services in the university environment, with the help of which staff and students can currently access certain facility services. A next generation ecosystem would instead use decentralized identifiers. Similar efforts are being made in Germany, where we are working with other industry partners, universities, and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research to explore and possibly implement verifiable credentials.

What advice or key points would you give to the people undertaking any type of edtech projects or initiatives?

My first advice would be to pay attention to self-sovereign identity and verifiable credentials instead of building a centralised solution and trying to completely rebuild how you manage your student data. My second advice would be to decide which ecosystems to trust and use those to exchange verifiable credentials. There will be many different ecosystems, and not everyone will use the same technology solutions or crypto networks – which is okay.

However, a simple way to exchange information between different ecosystems is to form verifiable credentials and a crypto fingerprint. My third and last advice would be to be agnostic about technology. If a particular third-party company built the technology, it would not cover all the required bases, hindering the users to decide what they want to use for themselves. People always forget that governance is needed for an ecosystem and is almost as important as the existing technology. Knowing who will govern the ecosystem is a more crucial decision than choosing the manufacturer of the ecosystem.