Wallet-based micro-credentials in immersive education: European governance for privacy-preserving verification

As European education increasingly experiments with immersive, metaverse-like environments, the portability of learning outcomes across institutions and platforms becomes a practical requirement. In parallel, European policy developments promote micro-credentials and the wider adoption of machine-verifiable attestations, increasingly conceived as wallet-presented verifiable credentials. This trajectory is reinforced by Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, which establishes the European Digital Identity Framework and provides the legal basis for European Digital Identity Wallets. Within immersive learning contexts—where learners may move across multiple platforms, institutions, and communities—credentialing becomes an infrastructure of trust, but also a potential source of privacy risks, particularly through linkability, metadata leakage, identity persistence, and excessive logging. This paper argues that the central governance challenge is not merely issuing digital credentials for immersive learning, but ensuring that credential ecosystems do not evolve into cross-context tracking infrastructures. To address this challenge, the paper develops a technical-legal governance model for privacy-preserving, interoperable educational credentials in the European context. The model combines a lifecycle-based risk taxonomy, privacy-preserving presentation patterns, and institutional governance levers for procurement and policy. It is then applied to a cross-institution European scenario in which immersive course completion is attested through wallet-presented credentials and verified by external institutions or employers. The paper concludes with a blueprint for privacy-preserving credentialing that supports trustworthy recognition of immersive learning outcomes while safeguarding learner privacy, agency, and fairness.