EBSI projects
Educational Identification in Europe
Helping higher education alliances align on an interoperable system for managing students' identification when accessing facilities and services across Europe.
The vision
Led by a consortium of 2+ universities and 4+ IT providers from Spain, Romania and Ireland.
Together, they are shaping the simplicity and reliability of Educational IDs throughout Europe by creating a presentation and verification system for eIDAS and eduGAIN to achieve cross-border university education mobility by establishing a stable student identification architecture.
Universities
IT Providers
Educational Identification in Europe
Participating countries:
/
Universities: (Issuers of educational credentials)
IT providers:
Infrastructure:
The challenge
Proving students' identity across universities in Europe is challenging.
Students are increasingly looking to personalise their learning paths to build a diverse academic profile. However, moving between universities currently involves dealing with time-consuming administrative and verification hurdles to exchange information that accurately identifies students. Students often have to carry physical (paper) copies of their identity and student identity or use a private-sector third-party intermediary to authenticate their identities and student status. This means current options are centralised, costly, time-consuming, and prone to errors.
The opportunity
Web3 has the potential to revolutionise education identification.
The aim is to create an architecture for general student identification using Educational IDs that other systems can use for more specific use cases in the educational sector, with the end goal of helping students manage their own student identification. See their collaboration with the University Alliance project to view how their architecture was adopted by another system.
A Web3 presentation and verification infrastructure for student identification credentials brings together three main technologies:
- Digital Wallets: used by students and universities to receive, store, and send credentials on the move.
- Verifiable Credentials: for formatting, presenting, and exchanging credential data in a machine-friendly way.
- Blockchain: for delivering a highly secure, resilient, and decentralised way of verifying credential information.
The project
Building the foundations of a new student identification infrastructure using EBSI.
The project leverages the power of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) to build the foundations of the digital infrastructure needed for a seamless cross-border learning experience. The project unites 2 universities and 4 IT providers from Spain, Romania and Ireland to achieve this.
EBSI allows this project to design, build, and operate the next generation of decentralised services. The objective of this project is to enhance the student experience by allowing them to:
- Have their student status recognised and authenticated, enabling them to obtain a personally unique yet privacy-preserving Educational ID.
- Seamlessly present their Educational ID credentials for verification with third parties (i.e., other universities).
- Enable secure data sharing, selective disclosure, and control over personal student information across nations and institutions.
The scenario
Discover the scenarios.
1. Issuance, storage and presentation of an Educational ID.
Monica is a student at the University of Extremadura (ES).
- Monica digitally authenticates her identity once through a university identification verification portal and 1 requests the issuance of an Educational ID credential that states her student identity, as well as any other student properties issued on the credential by the university (e.g., age, duration, programme, courses, etc.).
- The University 2 issues the credential to Monica and she 3 stores it in her personal digital wallet.
- Monica then applies to an Erasmus programme at the Western University of Arad (RO). She 4 presents her Educational ID credential to prove her student identity in the application process. The university is able to 5 verify her identity against the EBSI ledger and confirm her student status in her application process.
2. Utility of an Educational ID for accessing services.
Once accepted into the university, she travels to Romania.
- Once she arrives Romania, to gain access to the Erasmus University library, Monica scans the entry QR code using her digital wallet. She is able to use her wallet to 6 present only the specific information from her Educational ID credential that is required to gain access to the library and other services provided by the university (an example of selective disclosure).
- The system is able to automatically 7 verify her status as a student on Erasmus via her Educational ID credentials, swiftly allowing Monica to 8 gain access and use the facilities of the library.
The project plan
Current implementation stage and plan.
Next steps
Mobilisation of the ecosystem is key to driving adoption.
Achieving this unified student experience demands a strategic and operational paradigm shift, mobilising a vast ecosystem involving universities, legal entities, ministries, and students. The creation of a cohesive digital infrastructure for this Educational ID project necessitates common guidelines, including an improved identification system and verification architecture for seamless, secure, and cross-sectorial inter-university student identification.
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