2022-12-01 –, Virtual Workshop 1
The higher education landscape in Europe changes through the thriving European University Alliances (UAs). They enable students to obtain degrees by combining studies among several HEIs. UAs should offer seamless cross-border collaboration and inspire new forms of mobility and exchange. They form decentralized environments where the concept of Digital Academic Credentials adapted to their specific needs and data interoperability are paramount.
The general topic of the workshop is the role of digital academic credentials in supporting a European University Alliance digital experience (DServX) -- as means of identification/authentication and for trustfully and flexibly documenting academic achievements.
More specifically, the proposed Workshop will present how the European Reform University Alliance | ERUA (https://erua-eui.eu/) is designing a digital academic credentials infrastructure for the needs of the Alliance which will support: a) a common identity for students and academic personnel, branded as ERUA:Id, to allo2 seamless and secure access to all ERUA digital services, b) issuance of digital credentials for qualification-related attestations and student data (achievement records). In the Workshop we aim to interact and learn from other Alliances, and similar national initiatives and policy experts from the field of Digital Credentials (in education and other related domains, for example in the domain of mobile Travel Credentials), and discuss architecture decisions in light of the technical guidelines on implementing the New European Digital ID Wallet (EDIW) which is expected by the end of September.
Guiding questions for the Workshop include:
- How can we establish interoperability in issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying intra and inter-Alliances digital credentials while minimizing deployment and integration with the existing University IT infrastructure costs and providing high levels of assurance and privacy safeguards?
- How is it possible to define a common data model across Europe for digital academic credentials?
- What is technically possible now (is the SSI paradigm the most promising approach?) and what are the challenges ahead (specifically, in relation with the establishment of a common digital identity across the EU and the undergoing EBSI and Digital Europe pilot deployment projects)?
- How should digital academic credentials complete and improve the usability and the security of the existing eduGAIN services?
Petros Kavassalis is the Dean of the Engineering School of the University of the Aegean and the Director of theInformation Management Lab, i4M Lab). Petros Kavassalis holds a degree in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a Ph.D. from Dauphine University in Paris (Economics and Management) - doctoral programme in collaboration with Ecole polytechnique, Cenrtre de Recherche en Gestion (GRG). In the past, he worked as a Researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (Centre de Recherche en Gestion), at MIT (Research Program onCommunication Policy – now part of SSRC), where he has contributed to the foundation of the MIT Internet Telecommunications Convergence Consortium MIT-ITC, and at ICS-Forth, Greece.
His interests focus on the fields of Information Management, e-Identity and Privacy Management in Federated and Self-Sovereign Environments, Blockchain and Decentralized Systems, Business Process Modeling and Automation, Document Engineering, Communications Policy and Organization of the Digital Economies.