The case study abstract that was featured in the poster session of the national "Careers Registration" conference at the Senate House, University of London with an aim to introduce the subject to key Academia stakeholders from around U.K. higher ed. system. It is the first of a series of academic case studies on the transformative power that blockchain technology has. The purpose is to bridge the knowledge gap between the academic, business, and technology sectors when it comes to the application of distributed ledger technologies for learning and career development.

1. Introduction
According to a recent report by the European Commission,
blockchain technologies may "disrupt institutional norms in
the field of education and empower learners" in line with the
needs of Industry 4.0. The Commission proposes eight
scenarios for the application of distributed ledger technology
(DLT) in an educational context, based on the current state of
technology development. This poster looks into the
theoretical and practical opportunities for OS.UNIVERSITY
as a pioneering initiative in the field to be of benefit to the
“Career Registration” project. OS.UNIVERSITY, now part of
UCL's “EDUCATE” program, aims to create a distributed
platform on the blockchain that turns the potentially
disruptive DLT scenarios into real-life opportunities for
modernization of Academia, enablement of businesses, and
empowerment of learners (students, employees, life-long).
Method
According to a research by EY, not the lack of information,
but its inefficient exchange is behind skills’ demand and
supply mismatch. Within the case of OS.UNIVERSITY three
sets of "smart contracts“ are being deployed on the
distributed database as a method to improve the information-
coordination relationships among various stakeholders in the
field of learning and development.
Acknowledgments
This research is made available with the help of:
- The Fund for Doctoral Research at the Technical
University of Sofia and the Department of Economics;
- The “Erasmus for Entrepreneurs” program, through a
project, administrated by the Business & IP Center at the
British Library, BCause Foundation and Cobden Partners.
Key Findings
With at least 34% of UK Higher Education providers involved in the growth of Careers Registration (CR) in 2017, the application and impact of the
project as an evidence-based approach for employability support in higher education, continues to gain momentum. While learners’ data that is being
generated provide a lot of value by offering insights on students' careers thinking and preparedness; identifying specific employability needs of groups,
leading to targeted marketing and interventions; measuring the effectiveness of employability initiatives, etc., it fails to empower learners to benefit
further from their own inputs beyond the institutional borders and the limited timeframes of their higher education studies.
Analyzing the opportunity for expansion of the benefits that “CR” promises, in line with questions brought forward by the 3-year HEFCE funded pilot
project to investigate the use of CR as a measure of learning gain in relation to work readiness, such as "What is the best way to implement CR?“, the
author concludes that there is a meaningful opportunity to enable the data to yield long-term results by incorporating it into the so called “individual
learner wallet”, which the OS.UNIVERSITY project will offer as a free-of-charge service to learners throughout UK (and beyond) as of June 2018. As a
core value proposition, the wallet, also referred to as a “competence passport”, represents a digital credentials portfolio to store and transfer throughout
institutional and national borders credible information about personal accomplishments and achievements (originating from certifications, diplomas,
accreditations, etc., which are validated and verified though the blockchain).
Thanks to the set of L2A (learner-to-academia) and B2L (business-to-learner) smart contracts, deployed on the (Ethereum) blockchain through the
OS.UNIVERSITY platform, the CR data fed into the individual learners’ wallets would achieve the following:
- L2A Smart Contracts – data about learners' accomplishments would enable smarter discovery of additional learning opportunities, which on its own
will enrich the insights about learners’ career aspirations, based on the autonomous choices of the learner in the online space beyond self-reporting.
- B2L Smart Contracts - the connection between (A) learners’ data in regards to their career aspirations, enriched with information on the acquired
(and relevant) knowledge and skills at any given point in time and (B) hiring businesses with matching requirements for these profiles, will happen
automatically upon a “handshake’’, enabled through a B2L smart contract.
By giving back the CR data into the hands of learners and by putting it in motion on top of the blockchain, which provides trust and traceability of every
event in the individual educational and professional development pathway, learning gain aligns with work readiness more effectively and efficiently.
Conclusions
According to the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open
University "the blockchain technologies may hold an answer
to collating the outcomes of the new distributed learning
reality” and they intend to explore the possibilities that this
infrastructure could provide. In the spirit of the above
statement, the author extends the concept of a “distributed
learning reality” and connects it to the concept of a
“distributed career reality” (according to a recent report by
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost 25% of the
workforce change jobs annually).
This all leads to the conclusion that for the “school-to-job-
to-school-to-school-to-job, etc...” transition to happen in a
frictionless manner, a distributed system is needed where
data about individual learning and career aspirations,
achievements can be recorded and verified by multiple
sources, as well as exchanged peer-to-peer without the need
for an intermediary and the associated costs around it.
The multi-chain architecture of one open platform, such as
OS.UNIVERSITY, would allow for this transformation to
occur without any changes in the internal systems and
operations of the parties involved. (Figure 3)
Hristian Daskalov - Doctoral Candidate at the Technical University of Sofia. UCL’s “EDUCATE” Program Participant
Co-Founder of the Center for Open Science at TU Sofia and the “Open Source University” Project. Contact: hristian.daskalov@os.university
Literature
There are two main sources behind the current research.
One of them is the recent report by the Joint Research Center (JRC) of
the European Commission (November 2017) that includes case studies
of blockchain implementations in education from various players.
Despite that each of these implementations is still in a piloting phase,
the Center concludes: “It is possible to suggest that blockchain has the
potential to disrupt the information systems market in education by
loosening the control that current players have (in line with the
principles of sharing and transparency) and by empowering learners.”
The second key source is the book “Academia 4.0: University on the
Blockchain” (April 2018). This book highlights OS.UNIVERSITY as
one of the earliest and most prominent pilots, containing in-depth
research on the project. It is made available with open access at:
www.os.university/book.
Further information
www.os.university
www. medium.com/the-os-university-blog
www. twitter.com/OpenSource_Uni
www.educate.london
www.daskalov.info
Figure 1. L2A, L2B, B2A
smart contracts are deployed
on the blockchain, due to the
fact that the blockchain
enhances transactions of
information by offering:
authenticity; decentralized
trust; less bureaucracy;
direct interaction; security.
Careers Registration National Forum: Insights, Innovation and Impact I 18th May 2018 I Senate House, University of London
Figure 2. An OS.UNIVERSITY L2A smart contract in action
According to the definition, provided by “Investopedia”, smart
contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the
agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines
of code. The code and the agreements contained therein exist across
a distributed, decentralized network. Beyond cryptocurrency,
though, any number of parties can execute a smart contract that is
associated with the registration and transfer of value between them,
e.g. property rights, intellectual property, physical assets.
In the case of OS.UNIVERSITY, Figure 2. explains the logic behind
the processes of validation and verification of learners credentials
on the blockchain, enabled by a set of L2A (learner-to-academia)
smart contracts. More information is available online at:
www.os.university/platform