QualiChain meets in Madrid

The consortium of the QualiChain project has met in Madrid, Spain on September 19-20, 2019. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The QualiChain project targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The project focuses on the assessment of 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.

The Open University (OU) was represented in the meeting by John Domingue, Allan Third, Alexander Mikroyannidis and Niaz Chowdhury. The OU team is building upon its expertise from the Open Blockchain initiative to conduct a landscape analysis, implement Blockchain technology for storing and sharing education credentials and qualifications, integrate Semantic Blockchains in Ethereum, as well as conduct a pilot on lifelong learning. The OU is also in charge of shaping the overall dissemination strategy of the project.

In the first 6 months of the project, the consortium has defined the pilots of the project, which have been documented in deliverables D2.2 and D7.1. Project partners are currently working on the implementation architecture of the project, which is documented in deliverable D5.1. Based on this architecture, the first prototypes will be developed for testing within the pilots of the project. The latest QualiChain deliverables can be accessed and downloaded here.