Digital (Micro-) Credentials for Teaching demonstrated by a prototype for the TU-Vienna

Digitalisation has advantageously impacted various sectors and industries in recent decades. However, despite the widespread integration of digital technologies, highereducation institutions (HEIs) still often rely on paper-based methods for the issuance of credentials, such as diplomas and certificates. This is despite the fact that digital credentials promise to be more secure, reduce costs through automation, and improve privacy.In this thesis, we built a digital credentialing prototype for TU Wien to demonstrate and evaluate digital credentials as a replacement for paper-based credentials. The implementation is based on work published by the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC),a collaboration of universities that aim to build the digital credentialing infrastructure of the future. We extended and adapted their reference implementations to add missing features, improve trustability, and fulfil the requirements of TU Wien.The prototype itself consists of various heterogeneous services and libraries that together form the digital credentialing system. The chosen modular system architecture combined with the Verifiable Credentials Data Model standard by the W3C ensures flexibility,extendibility, and interoperability. Two added and integral parts of the prototype useblockchain technology to store critical trustable data publicly, such as credential statusinformation and trustable issuer identifiers. To interact with the prototype, each actor has its own specially tailored service. Issuers (e.g. universities) have a web interface to issue and update credentials; holders (e.g. students) have a wallet phone app to store and share their credentials; and verifiers (e.g. employers) have a command-line tool tocheck the validity of a digital credential.Then, a group of experts evaluated the developed prototype in the form of an expert discussion from a technical and an organisational perspective. The results indicated thatthe digital credentialing prototype improves security, enables new use cases, and allows automation, which can lead to a reduction in overheads and therefore cost. However, dueto the immaturity of current digital credential standards and a lack of adoption by otheractors, it is too early to adopt digital credentials for production use and as replacements for paper-based credentials.