Verifiable Credential Use Cases In The Education Sector
Traditionally, the education sector has issued paper degrees, transcripts and other academic credentials. While this continues to be a dominant medium, it remains expensive, slow and difficult for learners to share their achievements and assert their claims to knowledge in their lifelong learning journey.
Technological change over the last twenty years has seen many institutions slowly move to issuing electronic documents, mostly as PDFs. While this begins to alleviate some of the pain points for both institutions and learners, these newer electronic credential formats still fall short of true digital representations.
Traditionally, the education sector has issued paper degrees, transcripts and other academic credentials. While this continues to be a dominant medium, it remains expensive, slow and difficult for learners to share their achievements and assert their claims to knowledge in their lifelong learning journey.
Technological change over the last twenty years has seen many institutions slowly move to issuing electronic documents, mostly as PDFs. While this begins to alleviate some of the pain points for both institutions and learners, these newer electronic credential formats still fall short of true digital representations.
Read on to learn more about how Verifiable Credentials can be used by education institutions in the long term and how learners, institutions and receivers will benefit as a result.
Emerging technologies around Verifiable Credentials (VCs) are being increasingly utilised to mitigate the challenges of all these existing systems and significantly simplify the process for institutions and learners along the way. Moreover, as technology and digital solutions continue to evolve, VCs are expected to become even more valuable for higher education institutions in the future.
Read on to learn more about how Verifiable Credentials can be used by education institutions in the long term and how learners, institutions and receivers will benefit as a result.
Future use cases of Verifiable Credentials in the educational domain
Before diving into the potential use cases of Verifiable Credentials moving forward, it’s essential to understand why institutions have started increasingly implementing digital credentials and Self-sovereign Identity (SSI) solutions. Digital credentials, the digital equivalent of paper-based credentials, have helped higher education institutions across national networks elevate their systems for certifying, issuing, accepting and verifying academic credentials. SSI has gone hand-in-hand with digital credentialing to reinforce learner agency and assert claims to third parties through progressive and deliberate disclosure. Both VCs and SSI aim to enable the sharing of data in a controlled and trusted way.
But, this is just the beginning.
How are digital credentials expected to be used in the future? We’ve compiled a few future use cases to consider.
1. Streamlining the admissions process
Both learners and admissions staff are aware that enrolling in study and going through the admissions process is lengthy, stressful for learners and time-consuming. This might include filling in extensive forms with details relating to course prerequisites, academic grading, English language proficiency requirements, grade point average (GPA) and Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR). SSI ecosystems are decentralising digital identities, streamlining how admissions staff receive information while giving learners control of their digital identity. Moving forward, this will aid institutions in simplifying some of their most expensive processes.
2. Helping reduce costly data breaches
According to CyLumena, the average monetary cost of a data breach is between $3.86 and $3.92 million. Not only are data breaches incredibly costly, but they represent a significant risk to a learner’s personal data — where the cost of a data breach on an individual’s identity information could be astronomical. The culmination of these data breach consequences also has a wide-reaching impact on an institution’s credibility as well.
The decentralisation of personal data in SSI systems will help higher education institutions significantly reduce their risk of data breaches. Essentially, cybercriminals attempting to steal 50 million digital identity records would have to hack each of those 50 million people individually — as opposed to one centralised data centre. An SSI framework is also an effective and simplified way for institutions to ensure compliance with personal data protection laws, such as the GDPR.
3. Compiling each user’s credentials in one place
The lifelong learning journey is accompanied by numerous credentials for learners over the years, many of which are used on a daily basis. Physical credentials that are commonly used today include academic awards, student ID cards, university memberships, library cards and unique student identifiers — the list goes on. In our emerging future, Verifiable Credentials and decentralised self-sovereign mechanisms will help learners collect and store their credentials in their own digital wallets. This level of access and control empowers learners to assert their claims on their terms without relying on centralised systems. Advanced disclosure techniques enable credential curation, even providing a closer look into their interests, motivations, goals and aspirations. As a result, leading institutions are able to offer a more personalised learning experience — which is a boon to overall student satisfaction and enrolment.
4. Establishing Learner Agency
Improved award and skills articulation is a critical path to fulfilling learner agency. Learners are able to conveniently share their credentials in a standards-based way where they can be easily consumed and understood. Learners establish control and own their connections with issuers and verifiers — creating discrete trust channels of communication between them and the other parties that they manage. Verifiable Credentials for learners will enhance cross-border mobility and interoperability between systems using these standards-based approaches for not only the data representing the credential but also the cryptographic envelope that secures and validates the credential’s authenticity.
Benefits for the education sector
The future uses of Verifiable Credentials and SSI in the education sector don’t end there. With so many possibilities of use to leverage, there are a host of advantages that the educational domain can expect to see as a result. With verifiable credentials:
- Institutions improve the issuing of academic documents and achievements.
- Learners have greater control over their digital identities.
- Institutions save significant costs on reduced credential fraud.
- Learners can share their records with third parties, quickly, easily and securely.
- Relying parties can immediately cryptographically verify academic records with learner consent.
- Education providers reduce costs and streamline processes.
- Institutions support sustainable practices.
- Learners can access their verifiable credentials with ease in their digital wallets.
Employing SSI and digital credentials with Digitary
The future uses of VCs and SSI solutions, along with the benefits they can provide to all institutions, are hard to ignore. If your organisation is ready to streamline your systems, empower your learners and future proof your processes Digitary can help.
Digitary is a leader in digital credentials, providing an online platform for certifying, sharing and verifying academic credentials. This enables millions of learners to share their digital credentials online quickly, securely and easily — while institutions and their registrars reduce credential fraud, improve service levels and increase their overall efficiency.
With one platform, your institution can completely transform your processes with ease. Learn more about how Digitary CORE solutions in the education sector benefit learners, institutions and receivers or contact us to get started.
