Description
Session Description
The emergence of the Blockchain promises to revolutionise not only the financial world, but also education in various ways. Blockchain technology offers a decentralised peer-to-peer infrastructure, where privacy, secure archiving, consensual ownership, transparency, accountability, identity management and trust are built-in, both at the software and infrastructure levels. This technology offers opportunities to thoroughly rethink how we find educational content and tutoring services online, how we register and pay for them, as well as how we get accredited for what we have learned and how this accreditation affects our career trajectory.
The QualiChain research and innovation project focuses on the assessment of the technical, political, socio-economic, legal and cultural impact of decentralised solutions on education. QualiChain investigates the creation, piloting and evaluation of decentralised solutions for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications and explores the potential of Blockchain technology for disrupting the domain of public education, as well as its interfaces with private education, the labour market, public sector administrative procedures and the wider socio-economic developments.
QualiChain is conducting pilots in four key areas: (i) lifelong learning; (ii) smart curriculum design; (iii) staffing the public sector; (iv) providing HR consultancy and competency management services. In this session, I will present the current state and results of the lifelong learning pilot, which aims at providing support to lifelong learners in various stages of their learning journeys and of their career trajectories. More specifically, the main objectives of this pilot are the following:
• Awarding lifelong learners with transparent and immutable educational accreditation.
• Offering lifelong learners personalised recommendations based on their learning achievements.
• Supporting lifelong learners in reaching their personal and professional learning goals.
References
QualiChain project website [Online]. Available: https://qualichain-project.eu/ [Accessed 8 June 2020].
Mikroyannidis, A. (2020) Blockchain Applications in Education: A Case Study in Lifelong Learning. The 12th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2020). Valencia, Spain.
Mikroyannidis, A., Third, A., Domingue, J., Bachler, M. & Quick, K. (2020) Blockchain Applications in Lifelong Learning and the Role of the Semantic Blockchain. In: Sharma, R. C., Yildirim, H. & Kurubacak, G. (Eds.) Blockchain Technology Applications in Education. IGI Global.
Mikroyannidis, A., Third, A. & Domingue, J. (2019) Decentralising online education using blockchain technology. The Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference: Blended and online education within European university networks. Madrid, Spain.