The goal of MERLOT is to build an application that supports individual educational and skills development and aggregates educational offerings into one large marketplace.
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For the implementation, three highly innovative Advanced AI service assistance systems are used in combination with multiple education and career service providers.
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Educational data from different sources will be integrated in the European cloud infrastructure Gaia-X while ensuring data sovereignty and security.
In a nutshell
What?
MERLOT is designed to enable new, decentralized, and independent modes of collaboration while promoting educational equity. At the same time, the focus is on the secure, innovative, and responsible provision and use of data. In addition to learners, MERLOT also addresses companies, career service providers, and learning providers, and thus all stakeholders relevant in the learning and continuing education process. This enables a holistic view of learning. Using MERLOT eliminates the need to enter into individual agreements with all providers involved in a service.
How?
The MERLOT marketplace is based on the open source software Splice-X and a reference implementation of Gaia-X. The marketplace requirements are defined using existing and new open standards for education data segments as well as open standards for service descriptions and business model interoperability. A high degree of customization is possible through optimal matching of education data. The Advanced AI Education Services support users in lifelong learning through various AI-based assistants. These assistants include the Lifelong Career Orientation Assistant, the Lifelong Continuing Education Assistant, and the Education Profile Assistant.
Initial situation
Current projects working with cloud-based education data usually face the problem that they can only accumulate local or country-specific data. This inhibits innovation and severely limits both the user base and the applications. In addition, such a platform requires a large amount of highly sensitive and personal data, which in turn results in high data security requirements.
MERLOT marketplace services offer the ideal solution for this. Access to data pools takes place without regional or individual restrictions. Integration with Gaia-X ensures a high level of data security and data sovereignty. Thus, highly sensitive data can be processed using AI without compromising the privacy and data sovereignty of learners or other data sources.
three AI-based
Assistants
everything in one
digital marketplace
The August-Wilhelm Scheer Institute develops the following components:
Advanced AI Education Services. A software that identifies the appropriate education and training taking into account individual needs and life stage. This AI-based solution is created by processing education data in combination with various services from the Gaia-X data infrastructure.
Partner
FOUNDATION NOTICE
The Merlot project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection.
Funding code: 68GX21008K
Duration: 01.01.2022 – 31.12.2024