Digitizing diplomas for international students in Croatia
How CroEduPass is using walt.id’s Self-Sovereign Identity products to create EBSI compliant diplomas for international students that are verifiable in Croatia and across borders.
About CroEduPass
CroEduPass is a pilot programme initiated by the Croatian Agency for Science and Higher Education as a part of the National IT System for Applications to Graduate Study Programme (NISpDS). The primary aim is to facilitate applications to study programmes in Croatia for European students and to test the workflow for digital diplomas before committing to a larger scale project.
The Challenge.
The current process of admitting new international students and verifying their accreditation is paper-based and costly for both universities and the students. Around 4.000 applications are processed manually every year. The accreditations have to be notarized and translated at the costs of the student. There are currently strong recommendations to use the emerging European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) for this project. This pilot project on EBSI is a way to test its suitability for a larger scale national registry for diplomas.
As part of the EBSI early adopter program, the project team decided to use “Self-Sovereign Identity” or “SSI” to digitize the process of admitting foreign students. With SSI, the process will be verifiable, faster, cheaper and very well protected from fraud.
The Solution.
The project team screened the market for solutions that would allow them to adopt SSI fast and without much complexity. Specifically, they looked for a solution that is
open source under a permissive license (e.g. Apache 2),
compliant with EBSI and the new EU identity standards (ESSIF),
easy to use and integrate,
complemented by expert support.
Walt.id checked all the boxes and with that, the project team decided to use walt.id’s open source solutions and work closely with its team of experts.
The Results.
The project team has managed to adopt walt.id’s open source solutions (SSI Kit) in order to unlock verifiable diplomas based on Self-Sovereign Identity, particularly to verify received diplomas of EU students. Potential students will be able to verify and import their EBSI compatible diplomas into the system and avoid having to send paper records. Upon submitting their diploma for verification, the student can choose to import his/her grades into the internal IT system.
At the moment, the project team is in the process of requesting approval from Croatian Trusted Services to deploy their work. The plan is to launch a test instance by late April 2022 and to roll out the system in production on time for the 2022 Enrollment period which starts on July 1st. Supported by walt.id’s customer success team, the project team was able to quickly build up knowledge about SSI and the plan is to contribute to walt.id’s open source library as soon as the results are finalized.
"Walt.id’s SSI Kit was a great fit for our project. I have previously worked with walt.id’s founders and was already quite impressed with the work they are doing. As soon as I started the project, I knew I wanted to work with them. The team is experienced and always ready to help."
Mirko Stanić
Head of Central Applications Office,
Croatian Agency of Science and Higher Education.
Any Questions?
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About the organizations.
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Walt.id develops Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) solutions for businesses and governments across industries.
Developers and organisations rely on our open source products as an easy and fast way to use Self-Sovereign Identity - including Europe’s new digital identity ecosystem based on the EU Blockchain and the EU SSI Framework (ESSIF).
To ensure client’s success, our industry-leading experts provide holistic services including from conception over the implementation of pilots and production system to enterprise support and managed cloud services.
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CroEduPass is a pilot program initiated by the Croatian Agency for Science and Higher Education as a part of the National IT System for Applications to Graduate Study Programme (NISpDS). The primary aim is to enable easier application to study programmes in croatia for EU students and also to test the workflow for digital diplomas before commiting to a larger scale project
