Blockchain Technology and Online Education

Introduction

Blockchain is an emerging technology with a potential to affect a wide variety of industries, including education. In this presentation I look to synthesize the currently available knowledge in regards to the blockchain and education, and present it in a matter understandable to intelligent non-experts.

At present time, we can only glimpse at the changes that will happen in the next 5-10 years. A most common comparison in terms of the impact of blockchain technology is with the emergence of Internet and graphic browsers over 20 years ago. By that comparison, we are somewhere in 1993, which is couple of years before the Internet took the world by a storm. In a similar fashion, at present many people have heard of the blockchain technology, but are either confused with its complex nature, or unsure of its potential uses in practice.

We’re now in the midst of another quiet revolution: blockchain, a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records, called “blocks.” Consider what’s happened in just the past 10 years (1):

• The first major blockchain innovation was bitcoin, a digital currency experiment. The market cap of bitcoin now hovers between $100–$200 billion dollars, and is used by millions of people for payments, including a large and growing remittances market.
• The second innovation was called blockchain, which was essentially the realization that the underlying technology that operated bitcoin could be separated from the currency and used for all kinds of other interorganizational cooperation. Almost every major financial institution in the world is doing blockchain research at the moment, and 15% of banks are expected to be using blockchain in 2017.
• The third innovation was called the “smart contract,” embodied in a second-generation blockchain system called ethereum, which built little computer programs directly into blockchain that allowed financial instruments, like loans or bonds, to be represented, rather than only the cash-like tokens of the bitcoin. The ethereum smart contract platform now has a market cap of around a billion dollars, with hundreds of projects headed toward the market.
• The fourth major innovation, the current cutting edge of blockchain thinking, is called “proof of stake.” Current generation blockchains are secured by “proof of work,” in which the group with the largest total computing power makes the decisions. These groups are called “miners” and operate vast data centers to provide this security, in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. The new systems do away with these data centers, replacing them with complex financial instruments, for a similar or even higher degree of security. Proof-of-stake systems are expected to go live later this year.
• The fifth major innovation on the horizon is called blockchain scaling. Right now, in the blockchain world, every computer in the network processes every transaction. This is slow. A scaled blockchain accelerates the process, without sacrificing security, by figuring out how many computers are necessary to validate each transaction and dividing up the work efficiently. To manage this without compromising the legendary security and robustness of blockchain is a difficult problem, but not an intractable one. A scaled blockchain is expected to be fast enough to power the internet of things and go head-to-head with the major payment middlemen (VISA and SWIFT) of the banking world.

This innovation landscape represents just 10 years of work by an elite group of computer scientists, cryptographers, and mathematicians. As the full potential of these breakthroughs hits society, things are sure to get a little weird. Self-driving cars and drones will use blockchains to pay for services like charging stations and landing pads. International currency transfers will go from taking days to an hour, and then to a few minutes, with a higher degree of reliability than the current system has been able to manage.

 

Blockchain Technology and Online Education Overview

Blockchain technology as we know of it today has been introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In this paper Nakamoto draws upon a number of other technologies and ideas such as: cryptography, digital money, Internet, etc. By combining these ideas in a novel way, he introduced the new concept of blockchain, and the underpinning crypto currency - Bitcoin. One can think of blockchain as a distributed database or a ledger, where a large number of nodes hold a full copy of the database and can talk between themselves in order to determine if any one copy has been corrupted or changed. Such a distributed approach to information holding and processing has resulted in a trustless process of exchanging information (or value). Meaning that the trust between two parties is not required, as it is built into the system.

 

Fig 1. Blockchain is going to make communication in the field of education simpler

Education is a field ready for transformation through blockchain technology. According to European Commission report on blockchain technology and education created in 2017, blockchain technology offers significant possibilities beyond those currently available. In particular, moving records to the blockchain can allow for (2):

·       Self-sovereignty, i.e. for users to identify themselves while at the same time maintaining control over the storage and management of their personal data;

·       Trust, i.e. for a technical infrastructure that gives people enough confidence in its operations to carry through with transactions such as payments or the issue of certificates;

·       Transparency & Provenance, i.e. for users to conduct transactions in knowledge that each party has the capacity to enter into that transaction;

·       Immutability, i.e. for records to be written and stored permanently, without the possibility of modification;

·       Disintermediation, i.e. the removal of the need for a central controlling authority to manage transactions or keep records;

·       Collaboration, i.e. the ability of parties to transact directly with each other without the need for mediating third parties.

 

Blockchain as a distributed digital record

An obvious educational use is to store records of achievement and credit, such as degree certificates. The certificate data would be added to the blockchain by the awarding institution which the student can access, share with employers, or link from an online CV. It provides a persistent public record, safeguarded against changes to the institution or loss of its private records. This opens opportunities for direct awarding of certificates and badges by trusted experts and teachers (3).

The University of Nicosia is the first higher education institution to issue academic certificates whose authenticity can be verified through the Bitcoin blockchain and Sony Global Education has announced development of a new blockchain for storing academic records. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through an app called Blockcerts Wallet, is now issuing virtual diplomas that their students can receive via their smartphones, in addition to the traditional paper certificate. The digital certificates are tamper-proof and can easily be shared with schools, employers, relatives, and friends. Aside from blockchain technology, the app uses Touchstone, MIT’s identity provider, to ensure each diploma’s security (https://elearningindustry.com/blockchain-technology-in-education-latter-...) Using IBM Blockchain via the IBM Cloud, Sony Corporation and Sony Global Education developed a platform that compiles and manages student records from several schools, which school administrators, recruiting firms, and other interested parties can use to verify the credibility of the credentials submitted to them.

Fig 2. Educational journey recorded on blockchain

The blockchain provides public evidence that a student identity received an award from an institutional identity, but does not, of itself, verify the trustworthiness of either party. A university could still award a bogus certificate or a student could still cheat in an exam. The blockchain solves a problem of rapidly and reliably checking the occurrence of an event, such as the awarding of a degree, but not its validity. However, just as MOOCs make teaching widely visible, so the blockchain may expose awarding bodies and their products to public scrutiny.

 

Continued Professional Development

Always a problem, continuing professional development (CPD) is difficult to deliver, often fragmented, and poorly tracked. Imagine a blockchain system that really did this within a profession, taking issued CPD data from conference attendance, courses, and other forms of learning. Teachers and other professionals could get inputs from trusted providers and thus be incentivised to do more CPD, if those experiences and learning opportunities were securely stored in a reputable system (4).

 

Revamping The Knowledge Reward System
Startup Knowledge.io, which will soon launch its ICO (initial coin offering), is hoping to revolutionize the way knowledge acquisition and sharing is rewarded through its blockchain-based Knowledge Score system. The Knowledge Score monitors and measures a person’s proficiency on a wide range of topics (5).

Knowledge tokens are then disbursed as a reward for participating in what they call the "knowledge ecosystem". Unlike traditional academic points given to high achievers, knowledge tokens can be used to purchase products from the Knowledge.io marketplace and other external exchanges. (The Knowledge.io marketplace will initially carry over 300,000 products from their merchant partners.)

According to Marcia Hales, Knowledge.io’s Chief Operations Officer, "Textbooks and videos will be ingestible and Q&A sets will be automatically generated around them for use in education, training, continuing education, assessment, certification, and in other areas of academia. Additionally, through integration with COPPA compliance partners, children will be actively engaged in earning tokens to be applied to college tuition and other life improvement initiatives when they become of age".

 

Blockchain for Saving
Of course, diplomas and certificates comprise only an insignificant share of all the paper on the planet, but in eliminating even this insignificant share many public and private institutions will be able to reduce their expenses on printed products (6).

The cost of paper and printing itself is not the only item of expenditure related to documents received upon completing an education. Major institutions and schools spend enormous amounts on storing this information.

With blockchain, the right to control and store applicants’ personal data will be transferred to the applicants themselves, which will greatly help educational institutions. By removing the burden on educational institutions to reliably and responsibly store documents and provide access to them at the request of employers and authorities, blockchain will help to save millions or even billions of dollars as well as an incredible number of hours of labor.

The loss and damage of documents in education is quite a common basis for litigation, which results in financial costs and wasted time. This negative aspect can also be eliminated with the introduction of blockchain technology.

 

Conclusion

Blockchain technology is still in its early infancy. At present we can only but glimpse into the upcoming uses of blockchain and its future derivatives. As this emerging technology matures, and as experts in various fields become more acquainted with its possibilities, we will experience a type of double boom that Internet went through in the mid to late 90’s, and then again a decade later (social media, mobile phones, etc.). If that analogy proves to be right, in its first push blockchain will be used to better solve the problems that we are currently experiencing. While in its second push the blockchain technology will enable the types of possibilities that we currently cannot imagine yet (eg. Facebook on a mobile smart device, as seen from the point of view of  mid 90’s). The period ahead will be defined by blockchain and its impact on all aspects of our every day life, including education.

 

References:

1.     Gupta V. (2017, February 28). A Brief History of Blockchain. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2017/02/a-brief-history-of-blockchain

2.     Grech A., Camilleri A. F., (2017). JRC Science for Policy Report: Blockchain in Education. Retrieved from: http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC108255/jrc1...

3.     Sharples M., Dominigue J. (2016, September 07). The Blockchain and Kudos: A Distributed System for Educational Record, Reputation and Reward. Retrieved from: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45153-4_48

4.     Clark D. (2016, September 12). 10 Ways Blockchain could be used in Education. Retrieved from: https://oeb.global/oeb-insights/10-ways-blockchain-could-be-used-in-educ...

5.     Rivera M. (2018, January 7). Blockchain Technology in Education: Hot The Latter Can Be Disrupted. Retrieved from: https://elearningindustry.com/blockchain-technology-in-education-latter-...

6.     Universa (2017, May). Blockchain in Education. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/universablockchain/blockchain-in-education-49ad413b9e12