The European Commission is spearheading interconnected efforts to develop and fund an ecosystem that includes the issuing and consumption of digital credentials for learning. While the efforts below include initiatives that cover much of the same territory as OB 3.0 and Edubadges, interoperability between different projects will proceed incrementally. This report is not an authoritative landscape summary of these European projects but aims to offer an overview of how they relate to OB 3.0 and present opportunities for Edubadges.
Some specific pieces of this proto-ecosystem that are relevant to Edubadges are:
- eIDAS and related identity, wallet, key, proof and schema specifications are moving towards interoperability with Verifiable Credentials, DIDs, and they cover use cases also addressed by Edubadges.
- Europass, and the credential schema for the European Learning model and European Digital Credentials for Learning. notes. The upcoming ELM v3 release set for the first half of 2023 features Verifiable Credentials compatibility.
- European Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning (EQF) notes
- European Classification of Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) notes
- EBSI framework for digital identity and credentials, specifically covering the issuers trust model. notes
The vision for interconnection between these European projects is expansive, but the road to actual usability will be slow. Governmental regulation can act like a “market maker” here by pushing stakeholders in various roles toward compatible implementation paths, particularly by making it clear to credential consumers (such as employers) that there is a sizable ecosystem of credentials that they can gain access to by implementing one of the approved pathways. But regulation can also make it so that development of certain necessary pieces of an ecosystem is slow through the introduction of complex requirements. An example is that certified eIDAS wallets may need to support a wide variety of options at different levels of the credentials tech stack in order to ensure compatibility with credentials produced under methodologies approved by various national governments.
These European projects feature many compatible technology choices with OB 3.0, but there are also some key differences. Both OB 3.0 and European Learning Model offer a data model that can be referenced within W3C Verifiable Credentials, but the credentials schema and the cryptographic tools associated with it vary between these ecosystems.
There are a number of complexities involved in the implementation of each OB 3.0 and the eIDAS family of initiatives. Though there are similarities, implementing one does not necessarily make the path to implementing another significantly shorter. In order to maintain architectural stability and flexibility, Edubadges should be aware of the general principles covered by various initiatives in the European orbit and understand that expression of credentials in this ecosystem, like implementation of OB 3.0, is largely a matter of data formatting and transmission. A common basic data model may be expressed in multiple “serializations” and transmitted to learners or consumers via more than one “protocol”. Presenting the options to users to trigger specific integrations and building back-end capabilities to effect each transmission is a matter of building a modular application architecture and user experience (UX). Finding the right levels at which these models share attributes and the right points at which interaction with each model requires unique interfaces should be the focus of architectural refactoring of Edubadges over the next several years.
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