E-Logbook: Tracking Skills Acquisition Through Blockchain Validation

Research Paper Recommended citation: Sommaruga, L., Citraro, M., Foletti, F. M., Bertacco, D., Camenisch, P., & Carcano, C. (2025). E-Logbook: Tracking Skills Acquisition Through Blockchain Validation. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17632127. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. E-LOGBOOK: TRACKING SKILLS ACQUISITION THROUGH BLOCKCHAIN VALIDATION L. Sommaruga a, M. Citraro b, F. M. Foletti c, D. Bertacco d, P. Camenisch e, C. Carcano Monti f a SUPSI, Lugano, Switzerland, 0003-0254-4952 b SUPSI, Lugano, Switzerland, 0000-0002-0011-7423 c Vexek Sagl, Sorengo, Switzerland, [email protected] d SUPSI, Lugano, Switzerland, [email protected] e SUPSI, Lugano, Switzerland, [email protected] f SUPSI, Lugano, Switzerland, 0009-0003-5924-5918 Conference Key Areas: Digital tools and AI in engineering education, Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills. Keywords: Non-formal and informal education, entrepreneurship, transversal skills, blockchain, token. ABSTRACT In an academic Startup Garage, non-formal and informal entrepreneurship education is promoted by focusing on the skills most demanded by employers. A system has been established to validate entrepreneurial skills by awarding digital tokens through blockchain technology. This system certifies the skills acquired by students who develop their ideas through activities in the academic Garage. To track their learning progress, students maintain an individual electronic logbook (e-Logbook), where activities are regularly updated. The pingel@p digital platform, based on blockchain technology, utilizes tokenization to recognize activities and the acquisition of the related skills by participating students. The implemented tokenization process (TSkills) is not just a new way to recognize student success in developing entrepreneurial ideas, but also a fresh approach to learning and its outcomes. In an increasingly dynamic work environment, tokenization can pave the way for acknowledging and certifying vocational learning, offering an innovative approach to connect education with the job market. 1 INTRODUCTION The paper describes a student-centered learning ecosystem for the recognition of non-formal and informal activities within an academic environment based on blockchain validation of students’ achievements. The research work represents a practice-based study of a novel approach. This ecosystem has been designed to nurture the engagement of young undergraduate students focused on innovation and entrepreneurship at a pre-startup level. The purpose is to enable students to become effective and significant drivers of innovation, particularly within enterprises, and to recognize their achievements outside of curricular activities. A number of outcomes, policies and practices have already been in place since 2010 with the recognition of non-formal and informal learning (Werquin, 2010); Eurostat, in the 2016 Classification of Learning Activities (CLA) (EC, 2016), addressed the measurement of learning beyond formal and nonformal education and training. The classification proposed was based on three broad categories: formal education and training, non-formal education and training, and informal learning. Traditional educational systems are structured learning environments focused to promote formal learning, which intentionally follows curricula and syllabi where all the learners’ activities correspond to learning outcomes that are measured by formal assessments and recognized for their accreditation. Non-formal learning is a deliberate process that does not necessarily adhere to a prescribed curriculum or require formal validation, and it usually occurs outside formal learning environments but under a certain organizational structure. Informal learning, intentional or non-intentional, takes place outside educational environments through activities that are less organised and less structured. Intentional learning is defined as “a deliberate search for knowledge, skills, competences or attitudes of lasting value” (EC, 2016). While random learning, i.e. non-intentional, was excluded from statistical observation because it is not deliberate, for the purposes of this work we are specifically interested on both intentional and non-intentional informal learning. Within a non-formal and informal learning context, this paper describes a method to digital reward the entrepreneurial student activities through digital tokens on a blockchain. In the next section, the concept of entrepreneurial students and the challenges they face are first explained. How a digital platform helps to capture extra curricula activities carried out by the entrepreneurial students is then introduced, detailing also how to track and recognize them in an e-Logbook. The recognition process, occuring through a time-based tokenization of the skill activities, is described together with its overview offered in a digital wallet of the student. Finally, some conclusions on the implemented approach and future works are mentioned. 2 ENTREPRENEURIAL STUDENTS The SUPSI Startup Garage is a sort of Entrepreneursery, a place where student and Mentors are involved in the growth of entrepreneurial attitude, boosted by entrepreneurial students (Skippers) who want freely and voluntary to experiment their own innovative idea, allowing them to apply theoretical knowledge acquired during their academic studies in concrete entrepreneurial activities. In line with the Swiss vocational and education training (VET), Startup Garage's mission is to develop entrepreneurial skills among all students attending academic courses in different branches of the Department of Innovative Technologies (DTI) of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). In this conceptual framework, the Startup Garage Management Team concretely aims to identify innovative ideas among academic students and to put them in contact through a high-performance and innovative e-platform (pingel@p) with most suitable Standby Mentors for scientific, technical and professional support (Citraro et al., 2023). This academic initiative is part of an educational project aimed at discovering and nurturing startup ideas among entrepreneurial students, creating a comprehensive support ecosystem through digitalization of some outcomes. In feeding this kind of ecosystem, the planning board organizes learning activities, both in a non-formal and informal way, and assign tasks for students to develop professional skills by working at their own ideas. In line with Europe’s challenge since 2010 (Cedefop, 2010), the aim is not just to improve skills, but to match the people with the right skills to the jobs available (Cedefop, 2024). In this ecosystem, a method has been put into place to implement entrepreneurship consciousness and attitude. Thanks to continuously ongoing feedback, a set of services has been developed to help entrepreneurial creativity to evolve and to enable innovation. The main goal is to transfer knowledge gained by students at school and to apply it by working on their own entrepreneurial ideas. It is expected that the chances to set up and develop science-based companies will increase and science-based innovation will be encouraged. In promoting science-based entrepreneurial initiatives, connections between higher education institutions, the private sector, and society will be strengthened and accelerated also using digital tools (EC, 2013) (Felicetti et al., 20). This kind of co-operative process has led to develop an innovative transdisciplinary co-creation approach, with most principles based upon matching Open innovation 2.0, i.e., integrated collaboration, co-created shared value, cultivated innovation ecosystems, unleashed exponential technologies and extraordinarily rapid adoption (EC, 2018) (Radziwon et al., 2023). Interactions are fundamental to build and keep alive this emerging digital ecosystem as a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. Analogously, within our university, students interact each other and with their informal environment composed of spaces, people, digital tools, and extra curricula activities (Citraro et al., 2023). Within this framework of innovative and creative collaboration, the digitalization of information and knowledge creates a media and communication system that rapidly connects all stakeholders in social and economic life, enabling a high degree of interactivity between these actors, recognition of results, and achievement of merits. In a responsible way, engineering students, as motor and genius, can switch on a renewable digital economy boosted by freedom and creativity, therefore making student-centred learning and training ecosystem much more fit for innovation transfer. This human centric kind of new approach transforms these entrepreneurial students into pioneers, driven by passion, leadership, and curiosity, which are necessary to chart new paths in discovering sustainable ways to produce and sell. 3 HOW AN ACADEMIC DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM SUPPORTS THE ENTREPRENEURIAL STUDENT A digital ecosystem web portal, called pingel@p, has been activated since 2018 around entrepreneurial students allowing creative startup ideas to be efficiently supported by academic mentors, as well as professional mentors, to contribute to the transfer of innovation, especially towards Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Pingel@p is implemented as a robust web application with high quality of service (QoS) for accessing all the platform features, such as: user authentication; management of users, groups and roles; presentation of pages according to permissions and qualified roles; management of call-for-ideas for collecting students’ idea proposals; evaluation of ideas by mentors. By accessing the web portal pingel@p users declare that they will not disclosure or improperly use the information contained in the projects and ideas described. It provides also a restful API to make the platform's functions accessible to third parties in a regulated way and exporting ideas visibility. Additionally, serving the skill demand of employers, pingel@p has integrated a mechanism to provide persistent recognition of entrepreneurial students’ activities conducted through non-formal and informal learning approaches. This recognition is achieved through time-based tokenization that links activities to specific skills. The World Economic Forum (WEF), as a qualified reference for skills frameworks, reported on its outlook on jobs skills priorities (WEF, 2023) demanded by companies. The suggested skills, which are currently important for adapting to technological advancements and workplace disruptions, include as entrepreneur’s priorities for 2027: analytical thinking, creative thinking, AI and big data, leadership, social influence, resilience, flexibility, motivation, self-awareness, curiosity and lifelong learning (Fig. 1). These top 10 future skills are further grouped into 4 macrocategories as follows: cognitive skills, self-efficacy, technology skills, working with others. Fig.1 Top 10 future skills The pingel@p platform, based on blockchain technology, uses tokenization to recognize students' skill acquisition through completed activities. The tracking of these activities is managed by means of an e-Logbook. 4 E-LOGBOOK: A WAY TO TRACK AND RECOGNIZE NON-FORMAL AND INFORMAL LEARNING During their engagement in the academic garage life, the students are offered with various learning activities and tasks to develop professional skills while working on their own ideas. In the past, the tracking of student activities occurred through regular scheduled meeting with the garage team and a paper-based reporting. An important innovation introduced in the pingel@p platform is the e-Logbook, a digital registry that students regularly update to track activities and their associated skills. The e-Logbook serves as the foundation of time-based Blockchain Token Skills Recognition (T-Skills) that permits to build a digital wallet showing certified professional skills for the student, as identified by WEF. Each student, guided by a form page, deliberately inserts a record of her/his activities asking for the recognition of an amount of time spent on it, currently with a granularity level of 15 minutes, due to the non-formal and informal nature of activities. For example, the e-Logbook activity insertion form by a student for an activity lasting three quarters of an hour (0.75). The types of activities could be, for example, meeting with mentors, event attending, short classes, pitch preparation, etc. These activities are mapped on the WEF taxonomy skills and contribute to count the accomplished efforts on each skill. The validation of the time spent on the activity inserted by a student is then required to be approved by an actor responsible for that activity (validator), for example a mentor, an event organizer, or an academic garage team manager. For instance, Fig. 2 presents the online page where a mentor can comment (blue pencil), approve (green check) or reject (red cross) the requests of the students; already approved activities are also marked respectively with a blue or green check depending on whether the student want make public or keep anonymous. Fig. 2. The mentor’s visualization and approval actions of e-Logbook activities When the validation of 1 hour of activity is reached, a corresponding T-Skill can be assigned and stored in the blockchain to keep a strong proven verification of the partial achievement. When a minimum total time is reached on each different skill, the whole corresponding skill can be recognized by the awarding of a digital badge (1EdTech, 2024). The value of the badge is proven by the T-Skills providing a stronger certification of non-formal and informal learning supported by evidence. In summary, students collect time on activities related to skills, certified in 1-hour blockchain tokens, to reach the minimum to assign the skill recognition via a digital badge. Once achieved, a digital badge can be added to the student’s wallet or CV to be spent in the labour market. In addition, the awarding of the digital badge by a credible institution includes a series of verification checks and evidence, allowing anyone viewing the digital badge to trust its origin and verify its validity and authenticity. 5 TOKENIZING SKILLS Tokenization is the act of assigning one digital token to value the input of activity of each student hour in the academic garage. The tokenization process employed in the academic garage is underpinned by a secure private permissioned blockchain system, which is fully implemented into the pingel@p platform hosted within academic institutional infrastructures. Pingel@p’s blockchain is powered by a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) (ISO, 2022), where typically, the transaction validation is distributed among several validators without the need for a central authority (Nakamoto, 2008). Although this work is inspired by DLT concepts (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016) (Antonopoulos, 2017), the academic garage team takes on a centralised function in our setting, keeping and verifying participation and contribution records to guarantee data reliability and integrity. In fact, in our context, the academic garage team holds the role of the central authority, which validates and mines the hour activity tokens to be issued and transferred to each recipient. The T-Skills process, presented in Fig. 3 below, is composed of four different steps: profile system access, activity selection, tokens (TKN) distribution, and wallet allocation. Firstly, the validator accesses the student profile to evaluate the list of pre-allocated tokens where an hour of selected activities is approved and the hour token on the corresponding skill can be confirmed. Then, after confirmation, the system proceeds to the automatic emission of the smart contract and its allocation into the student wallet according to each category and skill type. Upon completing an hour of activity or professional development, such as projects, idea development, meetings, events, etc., one token per hour is granted to the student. Fig. 3. The skills tokenization process The token is generated by the pingel@p platform smart contract system and it is encrypted. The token generation system is like the creation of a new asset within a financial system with the main difference that the asset represents creative and effective evidence of professional skills. 6 TRACKING SKILLS ACQUISITION THROUGH BLOCKCHAIN VALIDATION A system has been created to certify students' entrepreneurial skills by assigning digital tokens through blockchain technology to Startup Garage students, so-called Skipper, following a non-formal and informal education path to self-entrepreneurship. This training path offers about thirty different activities. It comes up that each Skipper benefits the opportunity to choose freely her/his level of engagement and commitment in developing entrepreneurial ideas, so transferring knowledge acquired in completing activities. In doing their routes to a free voluntary way to transfer knowledge (Citraro et al., 2019), Skippers keep track of their learning progress through an individual e-Logbook regularly updated. Their individual and collective commitment is checked and assessed through different assessment criteria (quizzes, question-time, questionnaires, etc.) by the responsible in charge to validate activities carried out by the learner. The further certification process is at work through blockchain allowing to track the skills acquired (T-Skills) all along the nonformal and informal education program. Skippers working in the Startup Garage initially indicate the time dedicated to complete tasks and to carry out chosen activities; to each task and activity skills are attributed in relation to the WEF’s classification. Fig. 4. Total hours (13.5h) accounted on the Creative Thinking skill and its contribution to the Cognitive Skills category Figure 4 highlights a visualization example of the activities (left column) which contributes to the skill (middle column) of a category (right column). Any activity is split into different percentage of cross-skills-assignment, depending on skills acquirable as such declared by the trainer in charge of validation or recognized as predetermined skills attributed to completing activities. In addition, an annual certification is requested to pass through each of the 4 phases forming up the education program to develop a startup idea: Rethink, Build, Consolidate and Navigate, for a total of hours equivalent to 10 extracurricular credits. A digital badge is so composed and characterized in terms of acquired skills, forming up the student’s non-formal and informal education portfolio made up of the skills much requested by employers so offering Skippers greater employment opportunities. 7 CONCLUSIONS This paper presents an innovative approach to reward entrepreneurial students by means of T-Skills validated in a blockchain and collected in a digital wallet. The pingel@p platform, based on blockchain technology, utilizes tokenization to track and recognize students’ skills acquisition in non-formal and informal settings. Currently tokenization is used to recognize the activities and acquisition of related skills corresponding to the top 10 entrepreneurial ones indicated by the WEF report. The assignment of the digital badge by a credible institution includes a series of verification checks, which allow anyone viewing the digital badge to trust its origin and verify its validity and authenticity. This platform has introduced an innovative way to bridge the gap between education and the skills demanded by employers. By using a time-based tokenization system, they can recognize and validate the entrepreneurial activities of students, even those conducted outside formal learning environments. This approach not only acknowledges the diverse ways students can develop valuable skills but also aligns these activities with specific skill sets that employers are looking for. This mechanism could be particularly beneficial in highlighting the practical, real-world experiences of students, making them more attractive to potential employers. It's a great example of how educational institutions can adapt to the evolving needs of the job market. An important innovation introduced in the platform is the e-Logbook, which is regularly updated by students to track the accomplishment of extra curricula activities carried out in an academic garage undertaking non-formal and informal learning. Learning outcomes are verified and processed by the blockchain, based on a predetermined skills taxonomy established by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The mined tokens, based on skills acquisition, can be seen as extracurricular vocational credits, offering an innovative way to connect education with the job market. The T-Skills represent a first attempt to certify informal learning, which was lacking metrics for measuring it. With the support of the new tangible digital wallet, students will be able to collect tokens to complete their formal education, responding quickly to employers’ needs and to reduce job mismatching. The advantage is not only to give more value to students' skills acquired in non-formal and informal education, but also to implement, in the standard hiring process, a new approach that is closer to the needs of both students and companies. 8 FUTURE WORK As the world becomes ever more dynamic and fast changing, the role of traditional education shifts, tokenization can lead the way in recognizing and certifying the type of learning that is more aligned with actual job skills priorities of companies. Student with tokenized skills represent valuable candidates for organizations and enterprises seeking qualified personnel, thereby addressing skills gaps within the European labour market. To pursue an innovative method to avoid job mismatching affected by students leaving the education system, a Blockchain Token Skills Recognition (TSkills) has been put in place within pingel@p. The pingel@p platform, working in a university environment, and its process of skills tokenization is open to adapt, extend and integrate other skill frameworks in both a flexible and scalable way. By employing blockchain and distributed ledger technology, it will be possible to establish recognition of the value of non-formal and informal education on the same level of formal credentials and create a more progressive and inclusive system of education.