The national workshops organised in Germany, Sweden, Greece, Croatia and Italy allowed us to introduce the deliverables and outcomes of the project. Here is a quick summary of the key points presented during these workshops:
- The MyAcademicID core objective which is to create an authentication and authorisation platform leveraging on both the citizen and academic identity federations, namely eIDAS and eduGAIN. This will result in a unique eID to support the international mobility of students. This platform will be a step forward towards implementing the vision to enable “every student to easily and safely identify and register themselves electronically at higher education institutions within Europe when moving abroad for studies;
- The technical outline and scope of the MyAcademicID work which can be found in the blueprint architecture;
- The European Student Identifier format specifications which were updated to make the identifier future-proof;
- The authentication solution for mobility-related services (Online Learning Agreement, Erasmus+ mobile App, etc.) that bridges the academic and citizen identity federations;
In a nutshell, students identify and authenticate themselves, using either their academic or citizen accounts, on services related to student mobility. This allows for trusted data on users to be transferred (name, surname, European Student Identifier, …) when authenticating on these e-services and therefore decreasing the requirements for manual checks from the side of higher education staff on the data added by students.
You may now wonder how to get started with all this? The first step is to check whether your institution is part of eduGAIN identity federations. In case your institution is a member, then you should be able to start releasing the European Student Identifier via the identity federation, you should contact your IT department to that effect. Please note that in case you are not part of the national identity federation, you should investigate whether it is possible for you to join it. We are discussing with DG EAC on how to address exceptional cases where it is not possible for an institution to become a member of a national identity federation.