Education credentials are largely resisting the pull of technology, as they are still held in diverse formats in siloed databases, often involving paper documentation and extremely time-consuming manual processes for their verification. The latter come mostly into the foreground when education credentials are requested as a means of ratifying decisions regarding either personnel recruitment or individuals’ further admission in other educational and training programmes.
Indeed, the recruitment of personnel by an organisation is a lengthy process that comes along with combing through hundreds of candidates’ résumés, weeding out the unqualified ones and narrowing down the rest into a group of potential recruits’, whose qualifications and academic degrees have to be checked and validated on a case-by-case basis. The same applies when filtering out applicants for a postgraduate or other educational programme and creates a clear dependence from accrediting organisations for validating claims around the possession of certain educational certifications.
Disruptive technologies, such as blockchain, algorithmic techniques, data analytics and semantics and innovative concepts like gamification may offer solutions to these challenges. QualiChain targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a distributed platform for storing, sharing and verifying academic and employment qualifications focuses on the assessment of the potential of the aforementioned combination of technologies for disrupting the domain of education. It assesses the socio-economic, cultural, legal but also political implications of deploying the prescribed combination of technologies towards addressing the aforementioned challenges, whereas it sorts out potential benefits and risks.
QualiChain investigates and provides evidence on the transformative impact of disruptive technologies, such as blockchain, semantics, data analytics and gamification in the domain of public education, as well as the interfaces of the latter with the fields of private education, the labour market and public sector administrative procedures. The concept and focus of the project lie more specifically in the design, implementation, piloting and thorough evaluation in terms of benefits, risks and other potential implications of the QualiChain technological solution, a distributed platform targeting the storage, sharing and verification of academic and employment qualifications.
QualiChain meets its main goal through a set of targeted objectives, divided into two categories, namely:
• Scientific and Technical Objectives focusing on the scientific and research work to be carried out to deliver a solid, well-grounded approach for fully exploiting the disruptive potential of the aforementioned technologies in the given context, as well as on the technical work required for the implementation of the novel, self-standing components that will materialise the envisaged functionalities and their integration under a common platform.
• Business & Societal Objectives focusing in turn on the piloting, evaluation and validation of the QualiChain platform, the spread of the benefits identified and the assurance of its acceptance by the targeted stakeholders and thereby of its sustainability.
