Learning credential portability: provenance protocol development

Globalisation of the higher education industry has increased the mobility of students and workforce. For example students able to move across educational institutions, across learning modes and across borders, however, higher education offered in different countries is not identical, making it difficult to recognise learning credentials gained in another country. The lack of portability in learning credentials poses problems to the stakeholders of the higher education industry (students, universities, professional associations, employers, etc.) in terms of collecting sufficient evidences of previous learning and facilitating mobility for individuals. The process of evidencing the origin and validity of an item over time, to keep track and uphold authentication, is called 'provenance'. The concept and technologies of provenance have been used in various areas such as: antiquities; online learning; email properties; and e-science research. We explore this concept within the higher education industry. It is hard to maintain logical records in multiple institutions, in various countries, and in multiple languages and formats. At the moment evidencing the learning credentials offered by issuing universities is truly ad-hoc, and validity of learning credentials is at best circumstantial and hardly efficient. Provenancing learning credentials means attesting them at the point of creation/origin. Properly provenanced learning credentials are able to be carried across institutions, systems and borders. A provenance-based protocol is proposed to evidence learning credentials, promote the portability of learning credentials, and then the mobility of students and workforce.