Special Session 1: Trustworthy Digital Credentialing in Higher Education: Emerging Architectural Models, Data Privacy, and Global Interoperability
Academic credential verification faces global challenges in reliability, security, and interoperability. Most Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) worldwide rely on centralized or paper-based systems that are slow, costly, and vulnerable to fraud. The massive volume of international student mobility and the rise of remote learning demand immediate, secure, and verifiable solutions, generating a parallel flow of credentials that often exceeds current verification capacities.
While Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) offer auditability and security, a critical need exists to evaluate how these technologies integrate with or entirely replace existing systems. This involves assessing the feasibility, security, and regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) of various approaches: enhanced centralized systems, hybrid frameworks, and fully decentralized Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) models.
This Special Session aims to address these challenges by exploring and comparing all emerging architectural models— including enhanced centralized systems, hybrid frameworks that integrate institutional trust with distributed ledgers, and fully decentralized Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) models.
We seek high-quality research that provides comparative analyses of these architectures and addresses the complex socio-technical challenges of ensuring security, interoperability, and privacy-preserving data exchange across diverse global contexts, thereby bridging the gap between information engineering, legal compliance, and educational sciences.
The ultimate goal is to co-design secure, interoperable, and privacy-preserving credentialing ecosystems adaptable to diverse global contexts.
Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:
- Comparative analysis of verification architectures (Centralized, Hybrid, and Decentralized).
- Design and governance of Hybrid Credential Verification frameworks.
- Privacy-preserving mechanisms and regulatory compliance in digital credentialing.
- Blockchain and DLT applications, feasibility, and scalability in education.
- Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) in education.
- Privacy-by-design in educational data management systems.
- Socio-technical aspects of digital transformation in international academic recognition.
- Hybrid architectures for academic credential verification (Centralized + Distributed).
- Global standards for interoperability (e.g., W3C Verifiable Credentials and DIDs).
- AI-assisted fraud detection and equivalency mechanisms in cross-border recognition.
- Trust models, Identity Access Governance (IAG), and organizational change
Chair: Dr. Osman Selvi, Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Fenerbahçe University
Co-chair: Dr. Melike Karatay, Department of Management Information Systems, Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences, Fenerbahçe University