DBIS

In our efforts to support heterogeneous communities with the tools and structures they need, we developed our flagship peer-to-peer community platform las2peer.

In our latest research efforts, we developed a decentralized service registry and discovery system for las2peer, based on Blockchain technology. This allows to securely trace and verify the origin of a service and its developer and allows users to browse through available services in the network. In an even more recent addition to this, the implementation was extended to support valorization of community contributions via Smart Contract payouts to contributing community members.

We currently use las2peer in a large research project tech4comp to extract Learning Analytics data from various Learning Management Systems (e.g., Moodle) with a las2peer connector node and send it via end-to-end encrypted messages through the peer-to-peer network to a Learning Record Store.

The goal of this thesis is to make collected Learning Analytics data, extracted from various Learning Management Systems, traceable and verifiable by keeping a reference to the monitored data on the las2peer Blockchain. The thesis should investigate related work in the domain of educational usage of Blockchain technology. The developed extension should integrate into the existing project’s infrastructure and provide learners and their mentors/tutors with a tool to explore when and what kind of data was collected. By improving this traceability, we hope to increase the trust in the data collection (and its usage) from both learners and mentors.

If you are interested in this thesis, please do not hesitate to send a message to lange@dbis.rwth-aachen.de.