The Ministry of Education and Culture and the SisuID pilot − Improving International Student Application Process with Digital Identities
Nixu Corporation, Press release on December 18, 2019 at 9 AM EET
The Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland participated in the SisuID pilot in order to improve the application and immigration processes of international students. With the SisuID, international students can use a strong authentication before they even arrive in Finland.
Obstacles in the way of the best student experience
Finland has the best education system in the world and the education students receive is top quality. For Finland to continue to be an attractive country internationally for education in the future as well, the application process, immigration and integration of students must be smooth.
Starting studies includes many different stages. Currently, the process can be complicated and may take a long time, especially for students coming from outside the EU. To apply for and accept a place of study, the education institution, the Agency for Education and the Immigration Service collect information from the students to their own systems.
When a student moves to Finland, they must travel, rent an apartment and use social services. In practice, this means that a student must give their personal information to many places and they must go to many physical service points both abroad and in Finland.
During the application process, the different service providers separately contact the student either through email or by asking the student to create a separate user account for each service. Because of this, the personal data or process information cannot be transferred reliably between governmental organizations, and the situation is even more complicated with data transfer between the public and private sector.
Toward a smooth student experience
In the SisuID pilot, a new path was formed for the student. During the first service contact, the student creates a digital identity (personalized machine-readable identification) and an identification tool which can be used in all channels and across all sectors. With the identification tool, the student can log in to all service channels in the application process. With the digital identity (personalized identification), personal information and process information can be easily transferred between public and private sector service providers.
This model would make the application process quicker, because with a common digital identity, the information could be transferred quickly between different organizations. This would also significantly decrease the amount of information forms the student has to fill in, would drop the need to visit service points from over ten instances to only a few, and would change tens of plastic license cards into electronic licenses.
This would lead to savings for society as well as a smoother application process and better integration for international students.
A common digital identity that works across sectors and reliable electronic recognition would help to make Finland an even more attractive destination for future top-level experts.
Nixu Corporation
Further information:
www.sisuid.com
Joonatan Henriksson, Leader of SisuID-project, Nixu Corporation
joonatan.henriksson(at)nixu.com
Distribution:
Principal media
www.nixu.com
SisuID in Brief:
The Sandbox of Trust is a Finland-based digital identity initiative, led by cybersecurity company Nixu, Vastuu Group, Digital Living International, the Technology Industry of Finland, and funded by the pilot members together with Sitra. It provides normal and strong authentication for service providers in the public and private sectors at low-cost. For users, it is free of charge. All the code generated by the community will be published as open source code to produce a national identification solution. The findings of SisuID pilots help to advance the digitalization of the identification and knowledge of public and private sector users.
www.sisuid.com
Nixu in Brief:
Nixu is a cybersecurity services company on a mission to keep the digital society running. Our passion is to help organizations embrace digitalization securely. Partnering with our clients we provide practical solutions for ensuring business continuity, an easy access to digital services and data protection. We aim to provide the best workplace to our team of about 400 cybersecurity professionals with a hands-on attitude. With Nordic roots we serve enterprise clients worldwide. Nixu shares are listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki stock exchange.
www.nixu.com