The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has already changed the way we live and upended rituals and doings we have held dear for generations. One such is the honour of attending your graduation ceremony and receiving your degree – a milestone every student wants to celebrate and attend.
These events were an opportunity to take physical ownership of your proof of qualification, your degree parchment – an invaluable document as you start your search for employment.
Even losing this document later in life has consequences and it is very difficult to obtain a copy of it. And during these times there is nobody at universities to assist you with obtaining this or even verifying your qualification.
But, the digital age has finally caught up, providing a solution to all these problems. An app was developed to allow students and employers digital access to a person’s degree, the actual parchment, at no cost to them or the employer.
Veri-Quik provides each graduate with a secure, verifiable link to their degrees and diplomas. Better yet, when the hard copies arrive, they are counterfeit-proof as a result of powerful security features, including watermarks, micro-text and a verifiable QR code.
Lili Marie Flax spent the better part of last year swamped in books. Unlike her peers, who opted to enter the job market, she undertook to complete her Masters’s degree in Bio-Chemistry.
A tough task as it’s all thesis-based, with no exam or test to fall back on. She had a dream of walking across the stage to take ownership of this achievement in front of loved ones and counterparts.
“I really needed a hard copy of my degree. I started my community service here as a pharmacist and I am not able to practice unless I have a degree copy and I tried to get it. Before they gave us our Very Quick links, I tried to get a copy through the university and that wasn’t possible yet and Pharmacy Council wasn’t accepting a degree completion letter, which I had to pay for from the university and it was a whole mess. Without my virtual degree, I wouldn’t be practicing. I would be sitting at home without a job,” explains Marie.
The 23-year old Lorraine Matandirotye, a Bio-Chemistry graduate, was also looking forward to her graduation. Her family lives in Zimbabwe and missed her first graduation and vowed to attend her second.
Matandirotye says she feared that she will have nothing to show for her hard work.
“Having the Very Quick link, it’s changed the game for us all because it came when we were all super bummed about not graduating and then we got to open up our certificate and see it, see our names and it’s saying degree obtained underneath it and after that the moral changed, the mood changed and we actually got to celebrate each other and were able to say I did that. So, we were able to see it, see our hard work,” says Matandirotye.
Rhodes University in Makhanda is currently the only institution using Veri-Quik. It provides each graduate with a secure, verifiable link to their degree certificates.
Founder of the Veri-Quik app Devereaux Joubert says it also eases the transition from manual to electronic qualification verification as the institution retains complete control of the Veri-Quik process.
“There’s a code that only redirects to the very link.com domain name with certain checks that happen on that, for you as a potential employer, even you as a student to be able to see that your parchment is verifiable. So, on the actual parchment itself, we have got a micro-text underneath the signature. So, that micro-text looks at face value like a line where you sign on. However, it is actually the student’s name, surname and student number. So, you as a student can know that that information is there and the employer can then actually check that the document that I have got. Does it have the watermark? Does it have the micro-text that’s got that additional information on? So, all of those security measures built-in with a QR code that is on the document, takes you to a verifiable website that is well known and it gives you all the information that you can check on,” explains Jobert.
The short-term plan is to roll the app out to other universities. A long-term development option is to use this system in the pharmaceutical industry to provide digital medicinal information leaflets for medicine.
A further development possibility is to able to independently verify the medical qualifications of doctors.
