Diplomas & Micro-Credentials Special Interest Group
Citizens now more than ever are demanding the convenience and speed of digital services without compromising the security of their private data. The process of issuing and verifying diplomas is one of the core workflows in universities operations, hence there have been numerous initiatives from different institutions across Europe that are exploring the digitization of this process.
The digitization of issuing and verification of diplomas and micro-credentials has been in the focus of numerous initiatives at national and European level in response to EU’s digital single market strategy. At the same time multiple privacy enhancing technology innovations have emerged in order to cope with the privacy challenges in these data exchange scenarios. These factors have led to a rapidly evolving ecosystem of players, solutions and specifications that haven’t yet converged into a single framework. With so many initiatives in this area working in parallel the need for a round-table where all the EUNIS members and invited stakeholders can join to align on the latest developments in the area and exchange ideas is imminent.
The vision of this special interest group is to create a cross initiatives community and foster the dissemination of information and best practices among EUNIS members. The stakeholders list goes beyond the public sector and academia, as the goal is to facilitate the interoperability between the academic institutions, the public and the private sector while offering citizens state of the art digital services when it comes to managing their diplomas.
Alignment workstreams will attempt to identify the technical and organizational gaps and build the bridges among different management and technical teams in a supplementary way to other steering committees at EU’s or member’s state level. Besides that, it seeks to assume a more energetic role in order to facilitate the convergence of the technical specifications and the agreement on common, yet inclusive and flexible EUNIS guidelines for the community.
In order to play the role of information disseminator its plan is to to organize wiki pages, surveys and get together that will ease collaboration and sharing of knowledge. It will offer an ideal environment for ideas to mature and will act as an incubator for new initiatives. The aggregated know-how will be used to provide an up-to-date landscape of the ecosystem that encompasses projects, solutions providers, software and deployments in the area of university diplomas and microcredentials.
The scope of diplomas and micro-credentials special interest group is the technologies and frameworks that enable the exchange of university credentials in a privacy preserving way. The intent is to cover:
- the technical specifications of data models and exchange formats
- the semantic and technical interoperability of the chosen solutions
- the legislation and the administrative frameworks that govern digital diplomas
- to learn from existing and working good practices, preventing organizations to reinvent the wheel
- to share technology and make digital development accessible for all citizens and member states.
The Diplomas & Micro-Credentials SIG has been formed in March 2023 on the basis of merge with the EUNIS Student Mobility SIG.
Read more on the Student Mobility activities here.
The Diplomas & Micro-Credentials SIG plans its launch at the pre-Congress EUNIS23 meeting on 13 June 2023 in Vigo.
The Diplomas & Micro-Credentials SIG has been formed in March 2023 on the basis of merge with the EUNIS Student Mobility SIG.
Read more on the Student Mobility activities here.
Join the Diplomas & Micro-Credentials Special Interest Group
To join the group just email the group leader
Carmen Diaz: carmen.diaz@eunis.org