Self-Sovereign Learning Identity
Who Owns Your Story?
We have all seen the panic of a Year 12 student a few months after graduation. They try to log in to their school email to find an old assignment, a reference letter, or a portfolio piece, only to find the account has been wiped.
In an instant, their digital history is gone.
This is a small symptom of a much larger structural problem. In our current education system, institutions own the data, not the learner. Schools, universities, and employers lock learning evidence inside “walled gardens”—LMSs, HR platforms, and proprietary portals. When the learner leaves, they leave empty-handed.
This isn’t just an administrative annoyance. As we explored in Article 2, recognition is a fundamental act of belonging. When we strip a young person of their learning history every time they transition, we fracture their identity. We force them to start from scratch, over and over again.
The Digital Homelessness of the Learner
Currently, a learner’s identity is scattered across a dozen disconnected databases. A swimming certificate here, a VET module there, a casual job reference in a PDF somewhere else. None of these systems talk to each other.
Worse, the “user” is rarely the learner. The user is the administrator. The student is just a row in a spreadsheet, a passive recipient of grades.
This lack of ownership has psychological consequences. Research on Self-Determination Theory tells us that autonomy and competence are critical for engagement. When students have no control over their own learning record, they become passengers in their own lives. They develop a “compliance mindset”—doing work to please the system, rather than building a narrative for themselves.
Enter Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)
The solution lies in a shift from institutional identity to Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI).
In an SSI model, the learner holds the “wallet.”
• The Institution acts as an issuer (notaries who verify a claim).
• The Learner acts as the holder (owners who store and share the claim).
• The Employer/Uni acts as the verifier (who trusts the claim).
This is the logic behind Learning and Employment Records (LERs). An LER is a digital portfolio that belongs to the individual, not the school. It travels with them. It allows a student to combine a Year 10 report card, a microcredential from a casual job at McDonald’s, and a badge for community volunteering into a single, verifiable story.
Technology as the Enabler, Not the Hero
We often get bogged down in the tech—Blockchain, Verifiable Credentials, Distributed Ledgers. But the tech is just the plumbing. The real revolution is the power shift.
• Blockchain/DLT acts as the “trust anchor,” ensuring that a certificate hasn’t been forged, without the need to call the university registrar to check.
• AI acts as the “curator,” helping learners make sense of their own data. Imagine a personal AI agent that looks at your wallet and says, “You have strong evidence of teamwork from your sports coaching and your retail job. Here is how you can articulate that skill for this job application.”
Examples of the Future, Today
This is not science fiction.
• Learning Vault is providing digital wallets for globally interoperable digital credentials, supporting skills-based hiring, rapid upskilling, and workforce planning.
• The Digital Credentials Consortium, involving major universities, is building an ecosystem where learners control their data to enable skills-based hiring.
• In Australia, we are seeing the early stages of this with “learner profiles” in states like South Australia, though they often remain trapped in state-run systems rather than true user-owned wallets.
Reclaiming the Narrative
If we want young people to have agency (Article 3), they need ownership. You cannot be the “CEO of your own life” if you don’t have access to your own files.
A Self-Sovereign Learning Identity does more than smooth the transition between school and work. It tells the learner: This story is yours. You built it. You keep it.
It turns the “missing middle” into a bridge that the learner carries with them.
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Next: The Final Synthesis—Re-Humanising the System: From Compliance to Coherence.