Blockchain in Engineering Education: The Teaching Factory Paradigm

Abstract

The research work presented in this paper is related to the design and development of a framework based on the Blockchain technology for the upscaling of modern academic education. The goal is to securely and successfully connect the multiple stakeholders involved in the academic education, including students, universities, research organizations and industries as well. Based on the concept of the distributed ledger, each stakeholder maintains a copy of the Blockchain locally, ensuring valuable information, such as achievements, projects, intellectual property, and patents/inventions. By extension, the proposed framework can act as a reward system for the academic stakeholders, i.e. the universities and the students. On the one hand, students via the creation of a virtual wallet can gather reward points based on their performance, their achievements as well as their participation in Teaching Factories (TF). On the other hand, universities can benefit from this framework as regards their accreditation, in worldwide basis. Concretely, with the participation in TF, award points are provided to these organizations, which act as a proof of the educational quality they provide to the students. Similarly, industries and research foundations, are also rewarded for their participation in such TF. The TF in the proposed framework can be realized as Smart contracts created by the industries and undertaken by the academic or research organizations. Furthermore, with the proposed framework human resources managers are facilitated in selecting competent and adequately qualified professionals. The selection of the professionals is based on their academic portfolio, which is part of the distributed ledger. Therefore under the scope of this research work, a group of young engineers was formed. The students had the opportunity to get familiar with the concept of Blockchain and assisted in the conceptualization and development of a distributed Teaching Factory platform based on the Blockchain Technology.