UNIVERSITY PROCESS OPTIMISATION THROUGH SMART CURRICULUM DESIGN AND BLOCKCHAIN-BASED STUDENT ACCREDITATION

Abstract

The main goals of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are to develop the intellectual abilities of students as well as prepare them for entering the labor market. The connection between HEIs and the labor market is why the effectiveness and quality of the provided services of academic institutions tend to be evaluated in terms of the time it takes for their graduates to find employment. This paper presents work from the EU funded research project QualiChain that aims to transform and revolutionize the domain of public education as well as its interfaces with those of private education, the labor market, public and private organizations and society at large, drawing its added value proposition from the challenges currently faced in these domains. The ultimate goal of the project is the development of the QualiChain platform that will offer blockchain-enabled verification of education and other credentials as well as data analytics and decision support for process optimization. The platform will be validated via its implementation in four different pilot cases. The present paper focuses on the pilot of optimizing university operations through semantically enhanced data and advanced decision support algorithms that will be implemented in the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).