BLISS project ending in March

March marks the end of the BLISS project, which was started by six partners in 2017 to strengthen key competences for the ICT professionals in the field of blockchain technology by developing educational resources and materials, which are now available for free online.

“The main outcome of the project is the training and assessment material, the trainer handbook, a vocational open online course and a blockchain skills certificate,” told Raimundas Matulevičius, Professor of Information Security at the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu.

“The project results can be used in the future by the ICT professionals, students, VET providers, field experts, the policymakers and any other interested learners, who wish to understand and explore the key topics about the blockchain platforms and applications,” said Matulevičius.

BLISS has seven partners from Europe and the materials are available in their local languages, including English, French, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian and Estonian. The online course is six weeks long and graduates get a Blockchain Skills Certificate Supplement as proof of completing the course.

The course material is structured into four learning units:

• Blockchain essentials for ICT professionals, where the essential blockchain characteristics are defined and fundamental features of blockchain technology are addressed.
• Blockchain platforms and applications, where appropriate technical options for blockchain design and implementation are selected; it also specifies, refines, updates and makes available a formal approach to design solutions, necessary to develop and operate a blockchain application.
• Communicating the business merits, challenges and implications of blockchain technology, where the characteristics of blockchain technology to disrupt and/or innovate existing business models and business processes are examined; it also discusses existing blockchain-based use cases in industries such as finance, public services, provenance, supply chains etc.
• Practical design and development of blockchain applications, where process and state modelling languages suitable for requirements analysis and design of blockchain application are considered.

During the project, each partner had a certain set of responsibilities. The University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science was responsible for the curriculum outline and the integration guidelines for vocational education and training (VET). Also, for the development of the learning unit on the practical design, development of blockchain applications and preparing the video introductions for each learning unit.

We also organized a workshop on November 9, which had 72 participants from both the industry and the university. It had lectures from Prof. Raimundas Matulevičius, Dr. Fredrik Milani, Dr. Luciano García-Bañuelos and Mubashar Iqbal.

All the materials are available online for free to use using the following links:

In English
In Estonian
Project website
More information about the workshop 

Project presentation (in English) 
Project presentation (in Estonian) 

Further information:
Raimundas Matulevičius, Professor of Information Security, University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science, 737 5421, raimundas.matulevicius@ut.ee.