Analyzing a Blockchain-Based Educational Application from the Software Ecosystems View

Many educational institutions face the challenge of dealing with different data types, available in different systems. These systems have data related to the issuance of student certificates. A Software Ecosystem (SECO) could be a set of software products with some degree of symbiotic relationship, consisting of a set of actors acting as a unit that interacts with a distributed market between software and services, along with the relationships between these entities. Blockchain technology promotes transparency, immutability, and trust, being an attractive solution for educational systems. This research presents an educational domain application named Educ-Dapp, from the viewpoint of SECO that uses blockchain resources to treat the students’ certificates from higher education institutions. The results of this work were a SECO model of an educational application that uses blockchain, and a set of research opportunities related to SECO, blockchain and collaborative systems for the educational domain.