Reference Model for Academic Results Certification in Student Mobility Scenarios

Sérgio Cardoso,Vitor Santos,Henrique Mamede

doi:10.29333/jisem/8491

Abstract

The 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.

Highlights

Each Erasmus mobility involves the exchange of academic records obtained by the student between member HEIs (Higher Education Institutions)
In (Pelaitis & Spathoulas, 2018) we find the fundamental reasons that justify the need for “information exchange” between the different HEIs, together with the functional description of the mobility program itself
The vast majority of HEIs use their own aIS (Academic Information Systems), their own databases and some proprietary formats (Turkanovic et al, 2018) for the long term preservation of the records concerning the certification of academic results obtained by the students – for all of them, the exchange programs students

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Each Erasmus mobility involves the exchange of academic records obtained by the student between member HEIs (Higher Education Institutions). The vast majority of HEIs use their own aIS (Academic Information Systems), their own databases and some proprietary formats (Turkanovic et al, 2018) for the long term preservation of the records concerning the certification of academic results obtained by the students – for all of them, the exchange programs students. The ongoing and future work is mentioned followed by the alphabetical list of all the references used This position paper introduces the work in progress to build such a reference model for issuing and exchanging (between HEIs) certified academic records obtained in Erasmus mobility scenarios, including the design and implementation of a functional prototype for further evaluation and to demonstrate the global properties of the solution by integrating with one specific aIS. The research methodology to be used is DSR (Design Science Research) (Peffers et al, 2007) with recurring cycles of design, demonstration and evaluation in order to improve the usefulness of the artifacts in close regard of the identified problem

Motivation

RELATED WORK

FUTURE WORK