The project “Development of a Distributed Digital Data Security Platform with Blockchain support for Certification of Education Activities and Higher Education Degrees” is a 30 month project starting in May 2020. 
The project is funded by The General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT) in Greece, and is co-funded by the European Union. Coordinator is the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) of the Centre of Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH).
Project summary
BlockAdemic aims to create a distributed cybersecurity system for certifying and verifying educational activities, qualifications and skills in the field of higher education and lifelong learning, creating an educational passport. To achieve this, it uses sophisticated blockchain technology to ensure the required degree of cyber-security and trust both at the user and institutional levels. The system will support an integrated ecosystem that will incorporate:
• Monitoring of educational activities using smart contracts
• Registration of diplomas by the competent bodies on a blockchain using consensus algorithms
• Verification of diplomas and educational activities using a decentralized application
• Better assessment of the learning pathway by evaluating learning activity with additional metrics beyond the learning outcomes at regular intervals
• Learning analytics and gamification to link metrics with learning outcomes and acquired knowledge and skills to support and enhance the above-mentioned monitoring, registration, verification and evaluation
• Ensuring the interoperability of learning tools through international standards
Thanks to BlockAdemic, education diplomas and learning outcomes will be tamper-proof recorded, helping to overcome the obstacles of trust between educational institutions and businesses and of learners and workers moving between different institutions at national, European and international level. The proposed ‘training passport’ and the so-called distributed digital security technology platform will serve to record educational activities, diplomas and certifications. Smart contracts will be developed to automatically process transactions using education tokens and transfer the latter to the learner’s personal wallets if the learning objectives that was set in advance are met. Due to the immutability of the records, trainees will be able to demonstrate to third parties their degree of involvement in any educational activity in order to evaluate the knowledge and skills they have acquired.
This will facilitate the acquisition of diplomas and certificates, the continuation of studies / education, or their integration into the labor market. Institutions and businesses in turn will be able to register and / or verify qualifications and certificates for trainees. The additional tokens will remain in the trainee / employee passport as proof of their achievements in their respective activities and objective by increasing their “reputation”. In order to test the proposed innovation, BlockAdemic’s partners – a research center, a university and two businesses – will pilot and validate the operation of the proposed technology solution in real conditions.
Project partners
Information Technologies Institute (ITI)/ Centre of Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH)- coordinator
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union and Greek national funds through the Operational Program Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, under the call RESEARCH – CREATE – INNOVATE (project code: 2EDK-04180)
