Rethinking Educational Accreditation and Onboarding with Decentralized Identity

Good. Good afternoon everyone. So my name is Yar and today I'm talking about, yeah, rethinking educational accreditation and onboarding with Decentralized Identity. So the agenda, I would like to split in two parts. Basically the converging of the the three trends, self-sovereign identity, he 2.0 that most of you probably all are familiar and lifelong learning. And then I would like to talk about the impact that this has mostly on the educational sector, but also human resources and us as identity vendors. So I'm Aire.

I have a background in game programming and biology with a minor in AI that's becoming much more relevant lately. And right now I'm the CEO and co-founder of Pierces Technologies, a company that is focused on connecting people and ecosystems. And we do this by providing self-serving identity services such as an identity wallet, but most importantly an identity as a service product. Before that, I worked as lead of identity at the Iotta Foundation. It's a nonprofit based here in Berlin.

And there I oversaw the development of the IOTTA Identity framework and I also designed the D I D method for iota. So the first converting trends, self-sovereign identity.

As I said, everyone here is probably familiar with that. Basically bringing back the idea of bringing your own identity as a user to service providers. It's all about controlling that identity, having verifiable data to share as well. This provides improved user authentication flows and easier data sharing. And for me, one thing that I always like to describe is that people are basically becoming the common interface for companies to integrate with.

Instead of having to integrate with all these different data aggregators or all these different parties that that hold data about people, you can directly integrate with the person and they will have all the data available to you as long as you need it and as long as they give consent. So even though self self-sovereign identity has been around for quite a bit, we haven't seen the major adoption that it can have at this point. We see a lot of progress happening on the standardization efforts with W three C and the Open ID Foundation for example. But we're not really there yet.

And I personally think that is really about the change with the EIDOS 2.0 regulation. So to me, this is really the EU wide adoption of self-sovereign identity principles. So those that are not familiar with eidos, basically a framework for user authentication and identification. And it works quite well for me in the Netherlands. I can easily log in, do my taxes, set up a company with my digital identity, but only towards government agencies.

I can use this and it's so nice that the private sector wants to use this but are simply not allowed and that's now going to switch as it actually becomes mandatory for them to up to, yeah, make use of this new regulation by 2025. And that mandatory part is only for certain sectors, but pretty big sectors such as the educational one that I would like to highlight today. We will likely see also further adoption besides the mandatory adoption because it's just simply so powerful to have.

Yeah, high assurance user authentication. So one big component of this is the identity wallet. The identity wallet is something that now the EU has described, what kind of standards it should follow, how it should work in their architecture reference framework. And to me this was actually a very important step because there are so many standards out there around self-sovereign identity and it was very unclear which one is gonna win in terms of the data exchange, which is a really fundamental protocol for this.

So to get some clearance that open ID with their SIOP open ID for VP and for VCI are in there. And also the ISO standard for mobile driver's licenses gives us some clarity on what exactly should the wallet work naturally. Public infrastructure is a big part of this as well. They'll probably just be run by the, by the governments, but perhaps there's still a place for decentralized PKI in that as well. Now that the private sector will also take a big part in this new ecosystem. So the third trend is lifelong learning. So this is basically the idea to continuously keep learning.

Nowadays we really need that. Tech evolves really quickly. Most jobs evolve through automatization, new tooling, et cetera. So everyone has to upscale themselves a lot. You can't really go to a new job and say, Hey, I have a degree 20 years ago in this field, I deserve this job now. Now you have to prove that you kept up with things. So question for the audience. How many people in the last one or two years have followed a online or physical course to upskill themself for over the course of one or multiple days? Can you do a raise of hands, right? Quite a few are doing lifelong learning.

So how many of you actually got a certificate for that? Something that you can share probably on LinkedIn, right? I think it's basically the same amount. How many of you did that at a university or otherwise kind of traditional educational institution. Literally no hands. And that's exactly the point that I want to make. So universities and schools are completely missing this revolutionary way of learning. They're not taking part, it's mostly done by companies now that are upskilling based on their own strengths that they have acquired their own knowledge.

And it would be really great for them to also take part in this. And one of the main reasons that they're not part of this is the fact that we need a flexible learning pathway. And with that, I mean you need to have the ability to quickly sign up for a course and just follow it. You don't wanna go through a KYC procedure, you don't want to have the expectation to go through a multi-year degree that you often get educational institutions. What you want is just sign up, get started, maybe get a nice certificate in the end.

So luckily the educational sector is working towards those with open badges. I believe it was also mentioned in the previous presentation. And it's basically a verifiable credential type for proving that you followed a certain course or acquired a certain skill. So these trends have been converging and coming together around self-sovereign identity. I already talked a lot about how AI does is just the implementation of SSI principles. And we now see that really happen with the adoption of very key standards in the A R F with lifelong learning.

We also see big steps towards that because of the real big need for seamless onboarding, but also the verifiable credentials to prove that you have acquired certain skills. So the open batches version three also basically kind of implements verifiable credentials and becomes immediately compatible with everything that we're doing in the self-sovereign identity world. So what kind of impact will this have on the educational sector?

Well, they kind of have to move towards more skill-based learning to give out badges for things, for single skills, for single courses that you follow. And they should support foster career transitions. This way they can be more, provide more reactive education. To give an example, during the covid crisis, the Netherlands didn't have enough doctors that could work the intensive care unit. So we ended up actually sending a lot of patients towards Germany. So thanks for your support in that regard. But th this was a crisis we couldn't resolve.

And if you had to go through a multi-year stage training to become someone that can work on the icu, you would still be busy right now. So that doesn't solve anything. We can't really solve that with some quick patches and skill acquiring because the ICU is a very difficult place to work. But there are other people in the hospitals that had other jobs but that could technically work on the I C U or at least have a quick road to working there.

So what if we can unburden their jobs by having new people enter the workforce with very specific skills that allows them to work in hospitals and do certain things. Not a multi-year nurse degree or many multi-year doctor degree, but just a few key skills in order to do their job safely in a hospital. That is the kind of reactive education that can now happen if educational institutions focus more on badges alongside their degree system. And yet this whole system of self-sovereign identity with open badges also helps these schools to maintain their trust and reputation.

Right now, if you have a degree from Harvard, that's something special, right? Because the name Harvard has so much meaning, so we don't want to dilute that. So if a bunch of people create badges that prove, Hey I, I've gone to Harvard and got some skills, but it's not verifiable, you really can hurt the Harvard name in that way. So instead they should also give out verifiable badges to prove yes, these people have followed skills here and we do stand behind them, but people that can't verify it, they do not that way. They protect their own brand, their own name.

And obviously this is also very valuable for the people that that follow courses there. This new way of thinking for the educational sector also requires more collaboration with the market. They need to know what's up, what's going on, what skills are needed, where's the labor shortage, where's too much people available? And this is really what we, what is already happening happening luckily, but they can't really react well to it because you have to change entire degrees and that just takes a much longer time than offering a few new courses.

So how can we help as an identity software vendor that is mostly they will have to join Eidos if they want to or not, but I think it's a great opportunity for them. So obviously we can help with that transition while we do that, we can provide that seamless onboarding so that people can easier join universities, join schools, and follow single courses there and basically make it part of your flexible learning pathway. They can issue badges for the courses that they get. They can also use the badges as prerequisites from maybe other schools online learning platforms that you can prove.

I do have the skills to follow this new course and for free, since we're following self-sovereign identity principles, you will get privacy by design and GDPR compliance, something that's obviously also very important still. So for human resources, the first change is basically already happening. They don't really recruit anymore on just degrees, it's much more a skill-based market nowadays. But we can help them out a lot with verifiable resumes.

No longer having to call the university, Hey did this person attend old work experiences, old bosses that need to be called to validate a resume, no instant checks through the fair fiber credentials and the badges that the resume is actually correct. And we know that this is a big problem.

A lot of people unfortunately lie on their resumes, but what I personally also think is very important is that we can really make the anonymous application process so much better because if you can still check the validity of the claims on someone's resume without actually having to know their name, their gender, all that other personal information that is absolutely not relevant to the job, that is super powerful because you have full trust in the candidate without having the ability or the accidental yeah, pre-selection in a way that shouldn't happen right alongside that.

If people can bring their own identity also to work onboarding becomes easier, create up-skilling themselves becomes easier with the flexible learning pathway. And a lot of companies that are already giving out courses, they should also be able to provide badges themselves as well. So we have been exploring this in in a new consortium, NG d i l, and this is basically centered around KW one C ing at from the Netherlands, their school of about 20,000 students. And they're very interested in the development happening with self-sovereign identity and badges.

And we are accompanied ourselves interest technologies with Tangle Labs as SSI experts and UNESCO learning cities also and BOLs. And together we're really trying to figure out, hey, what can we do with this? How can we really change the educational sector to, to make use of all these new technologies?

So step one, proof of concept already in September, 2023 that we really wanna showcase the seamless Eidos 2.0 compliance onboarding that can happen, how easy it is to issue badges, how easy it is to verify badges as a prerequisite, but also how easy it is to create and verifi verify a verifiable resume. This is not just a proof of concept consortium, we wanna really wanna push it forward pilots and in the end going all the way into production and expecting more adoption in the region and beyond that.

So our goal is also to pilot in 2024, apply for grants and if you're interested in exploring with us, you can either go to ngd l.com and reach out through us there or email me with the email address on screen. So we as identity as a service providers also need to realize that the business will change with self-sovereign identity adoption. Right now we are often the connectors of companies to a lot of data or we help them store data about their own customers. This is simply going to change a lot because the, the, the people will again be the common interface for getting data about themselves.

Since they can bring their own identity, they will be the center of their own data fault. And this data will be so much more rich that you ever want to dream. They will have, you have access in one integration towards simple user authentication, but also high assurance identification and all kinds of data like badges skills, but basically anything you can think of, even raw data that they gather about themselves. Obviously it's important that we're talking about consent for sharing for data and you need to have a need for this data.

But with a single integration, this data is at least available to you if you have a real cost for it. So if you would use purely an identity wallet on the user's site for this, this is not gonna work. For example, if I want to share my address with a bunch of companies, which I've done, they and, and you need to give consent on the wallet and they don't wanna store it every time that they need access to that information, I would've to say yes on my wallet, need to open the app. That's just, yeah, not the kind of reactive access to information that we need nowadays, of course.

So we personally envision that, that a lot of people will actually become their own identity providers host something in the cloud, obviously with a lot of help that will be their own isolated place where they can store their identity and store their data and rather than just sharing it from their wallet to companies, we expect them to kind of give excess credentials to companies to get that information from this cloud agent. And the great part about that is, is that companies no longer need to actually store that information.

They can request it instantly, always online, always available as you would expect from the cloud. And they always get the latest information as well. So if I move now, I don't have to go to 25 companies to update my address and believe me, I forgot that a couple of times. So that that will also be a much better user experience and companies will have the latest data always available if I change my address in my cloud agent at the same time, everyone will know the latest information when they need it and they can delete it after use. So that means GDPR compliance also becomes much easier.

No longer you have a burden of responsibility of protecting your user data and at the same time you can still be data driven, maybe even more so. So yeah, this, this was my talk. If you're interested in learning more about impair technologies, you can follow our socials. I also wanna recommend the talk from Mark, from Philco, partners of ours on more the SSI and IOT combination, which is quite interesting. If you have any questions but don't have the time now, you can also catch us for a beer on the address on the screen tomorrow evening. Thank you very much. Thanks very much Hill.

That was very interesting, quite uplifting and encouraging. I think the use of de decentralized identities you seem to have. It was a very comprehensive presentation. You seem to have anticipated all the audience's questions and all my questions you've given us loads of, of things, of ways to interact, get involved and get in touch. So many thanks to you and yeah, so once again, applause for ELA Milar. Thank you.