UNIVERSITY PROCESS OPTIMISATION THROUGH SMART CURRICULUM DESIGN AND BLOCKCHAIN-BASED STUDENT ACCREDITATION Christos Kontzinos, Ourania Markaki, Panagiotis Kokkinakos, Vagelis Karakolis, Stavros Skalidakis and John Psarras Decision Support Systems Lab National Technical University of Athens, Greece ABSTRACT The main goals of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are to develop the intellectual abilities of students as well as prepare them for entering the labor market. The connection between HEIs and the labor market is why the effectiveness and quality of the provided services of academic institutions tend to be evaluated in terms of the time it takes for their graduates to find employment. This paper presents work from the EU funded research project QualiChain that aims to transform and revolutionize the domain of public education as well as its interfaces with those of private education, the labor market, public and private organizations and society at large, drawing its added value proposition from the challenges currently faced in these domains. The ultimate goal of the project is the development of the QualiChain platform that will offer blockchain-enabled verification of education and other credentials as well as data analytics and decision support for process optimization. The platform will be validated via its implementation in four different pilot cases. The present paper focuses on the pilot of optimizing university operations through semantically enhanced data and advanced decision support algorithms that will be implemented in the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). KEYWORDS Blockchain, Education, Labor Market, Verification, Curriculum Design, Student Accreditation 1. INTRODUCTION When asked about the aim of Higher Education, most people would argue that its sole purpose is to meet the learning needs and aspirations of individuals through the development of their intellectual abilities and aptitudes throughout their lives. It is Higher Education after all that equips individuals to make the best use of their talents and the opportunities offered by society for self-fulfillment (South African Council on Higher Education 2013). However, in today's highly competitive environment, a major goal of higher education should be to address the development needs of society and provide the labor market with the ever-changing high-level competencies and expertise necessary for the growth and prosperity of a modern economy. It is for that reason that the effectiveness of a country's tertiary education system is frequently assessed in terms of the respective unemployment rates, whereas the effectiveness and quality of the provided services of academic institutions themselves are accordingly and not unjustly evaluated in terms of the time it takes for their graduates to find employment. In spite of this informal correlation between education and the labor market though, the training curriculum of higher education institutions is often shaped with strictly academic criteria within an isolated environment and without thus taking into account the demands of the latter; not to mention that it is rarely modified, so as to incorporate recent developments particularly in technology-related fields, thereby ending up being obsolete and outdated. Another challenge that slows down the connection between academia and the labor market is the fact that education credentials are largely resisting the pull of technology often requiring paper documentation and time-consuming manual processes for their verification. This mainly has to do with the fact that higher education institutions (HEIs) keep student data in centralized databases and dedicated online systems that offer little or no interoperability. 18th International Conference on WWW/Internet 2019 93