Abstract:

The aim of Higher Education is twofold: meet the learning needs of individuals through the development of their intellectual abilities as well as equip them with the necessary skills that will help them enter the labour market. For that reason, the effectiveness of a country’s education system is frequently assessed in terms of the respective unemployment rates. In spite of this informal correlation between education and the labour market though, the training curriculum of higher education institutions is often shaped with strictly academic criteria and without thus taking into account the demands of the labour market; not to mention that it is rarely modified, so as to incorporate recent developments particularly in technology-related fields. Another challenge that slows down the connection between academia and the labour market is the fact that education credentials are largely resisting the pull of technology often requiring paper documentation and time consuming manual processes for their verification. This mainly has to do with the fact that higher education institutions (HEIs) keep student data in centralised databases and dedicated online systems that offer little or no interoperability.

As such, in order to have more efficient curriculum design and trustworthy student accreditation, fundamental changes are required in the way that HEIs operate. In fact, it can be surmised from the above that the main problem is the lack of suitable IT infrastructures that can lead to more efficient procedures by providing structure to university data as well as some degree of automation. That given, this paper presents QualiChain, an EU funded project targeting the creation, piloting and evaluation of a distributed platform for storing, sharing and verifying academic and employment qualifications. QualiChain targets will be achieved through the combination of a number of disruptive technologies, such as blockchain, algorithmic techniques for decision support, data analytics and semantics and innovative concepts like gamification that can offer solutions to the aforementioned challenges. Particularly, blockchain technology, as a decentralised, permanent, unalterable store of information can help with the archiving and trust issues around academic credentials whereas computational intelligence found in the technological domains of algorithmic techniques, data analytics and semantic analysis may facilitate decision making and optimise work practices concerning administrative processes, course updates etc.

To deal with the aforementioned challenges, QualiChain involves a pilot targeting student accreditation, curriculum design and process optimisation within the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens.

This pilot will leverage:
a) Blockchain to validate qualifications, skills and smart badges that students are awarded during their attendance at the school and
b) data analytics functionalities in order to produce analyses around the current skill profile of students as this relates to the labour market’s requirements around the career of Electrical and Computer Engineer with the end-goal of updating the school’s curriculum based on the generated knowledge.

Along the above lines, the paper shall provide a comprehensive use case on how the aforementioned technologies may lead to university processes optimisation and will discuss the added value and benefits generated for the stakeholders involved.

Keywords:

Blockchain, Education, Labour market, Degree Verification, Curriculum optimisation, Decision support, Data analytics.