Reference Model for Academic Results Certification in Student Mobility Scenarios

Cardoso, S., Mamede, H., & Santos, V. (2020). Reference Model for Academic Results Certification in Student Mobility Scenarios. Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 5(4), em0125. https://doi.org/10.29333/jisem/8491The exchange of academic results between HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) is mandatory in every student mobility program (i.e. the EU Erasmus Program) but that process remains to present date with insufficient technological support and the absence of a comprehensive reference model that allows the integration of potential technological solutions for the exchange of academic data with existing Academic Information Systems seems to limit greatly the possibility of adopting solutions of this type referred to in the existing literature. This work addresses this problem, conducting an initial bibliographic review aimed at the identification of the fundamental requirements of such an architecture as well as explores some of the technologies that are showing potential for usage in the safe exchange of academic results between partner HEIs, with particular interest in blockchain technology applied in an educational context.publishersversionpublishe

Developing a universal, decentralized and immutable Erasmus credit transfer system on blockchain

Blockchain is one of the most hyped technologies of recent years. It promises to restructure the way applications are developed and to replace the widely client-server model used today. While the technology is promising the ecosystem of tools and development methodologies are still in their early stages. In this paper a proof of concept blockchain application is developed, regarding the exchange of data between different universities in different countries, with respect to the Erasmus program. A decentralized application has been designed from ground up and is proposed to be installed in multiple nodes located in all participating universities. Ethereum platform has been chosen and the required smart contracts have been implemented. Additionally an easy to use web interface have been developed in order to be usable for end users. We have evaluated both the development process and the efficiency of the resulting implementation. © 2018 IEEE