Over the past decade, technological advances in education have been widely popular, demonstrated by the many platforms that match educators with students like Coursera, Skillshare, and the proliferation of language teaching platforms. Blockchain technology is a novel general-purpose technology that offers the potential for revolution in how data can be maintained and transferred.
Over the past years, its promise has been implemented experimentally in a variety of industries and sectors, and education is among the fields where tech can provide real upgrades.

Education has been largely ignored in the evolution of blockchain space. That's why researchers Iuliana Chiuchisan, Cornel Turcu and Cristina Turcu work on the existing literature to evaluate current trends, opportunities and challenges of bringing blockchain solutions to the educational sector, the results of which were presented in their paper "Blockchain and its Potential in Education." The paper's authors concerned two main questions:

What are actually the most promising blockchain applications for education?

What are recorded outcomes?

Blockchain Education Advantages

In general, undergraduate and graduate academic documents such as diplomas, degrees and additional data are maintained in the issuing institution's central database. Because of this setup, students and graduates cannot access their own records. For external parties such as employers, governments and other institutions needing academic record certification, the procedure may be complex and time-consuming. In a world where students and the workforce are more mobile, it's expensive. While validating such records is becoming more relevant, numerous studies have provided evidence that a large portion of resumes contain false information about individual academic track records, most notably highlighted by the Risk Advisory Group.

Blockchain technology allows unrelated parties to record and share information. Each party keeps a copy of the information that can be continually modified. The technology offers a trusted, immutable, auditable and self-regulating record-keeping system (Atzori, 2017) with an encrypted database not requiring a controlling authority (Wright and De Filippi, 2015).

Therefore, blockchain technologies will provide a trustworthy mechanism for the storage and validation of academic credentials, open to everyone without the risk of altering records (Baba et al., 2018). Moreover, centralised information systems commonly used by educational institutions are vulnerable to data breaches, an issue that blockchain technology can solve (Efanov & Roschin, 2018).

Besides the increased data protection blockchain, it also has the potential to exchange data among unrelated parties, so that different educational providers and entities needing academic credentials validation can use trusted authentication processes. Only universities can generate and update data on the distributed ledger, ensuring that no changes can be made except by the issuing party. Once the data is submitted to the blockchain, stakeholders may easily evaluate this information.

Several more opportunities in educational blockchain technology were suggested. The European Science and Knowledge Commission has released a Blockchain and Education study on the potential of blockchain in credential issuance, accreditation verification, lifelong learning passports, intellectual property and data management.

Other scholars, such as McArthur (2018), recognise the potential of blockchain to reorganise the higher education system, and Tapscott and Tapscott (2017) highlight the potential of software to revolutionise higher learning through a trusted global network. For example, using blockchain-based education systems might create a peer-to-peer global learning network through disintermediation. This could include a trusted, open information system for all participants.

Finally, the advantages of blockchain technology in automated and highly safe software processes will reduce administrative costs and bureaucracy for educational institutions MacArthur (2018).

Early work

Several companies began experimenting with blockchain education system solutions. For example, MIT, Texas University Austin and Nicosia University have begun issuing diplomas on decentralised ledgers, and Sony has developed a forum for a next-generation credential solution called Sony Global Education. The Open University Information Media Institute is also leading academic applications of blockchain technology with its Ethereum-based platform OpenBlockChain (Lemoie, 2017). OpenBlockChain experiments with so-called open badges — digital certificates with embedded academic achievement metadata.

Risk and challenge

The paper's authors are also challenging blockchain solutions in education, mainly related to technology in general. A key challenge is compliance with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — GDPR was developed as a response to a multitude of large-scale data misuse cases and includes stringent data privacy and autonomy regulations ("right to be forgotten" protection). Blockchain implementations must be GDPR compliant and, as Smolenski (2017) points out, 'the blockchain is an opportunity not only to fulfil but to move beyond the European General Data Protection Regulation' pledge.' As Smolenski puts it, "the blockchain eliminates the need to trust a centralised authority to keep an accurate record of events," and "makes monitoring activity extremely difficult." However, paper authors highlight compliance with GDPR and other regulations as limiting blockchain use, pointing out the importance of compliance with data legislation.

Other legal challenges blockchain technologies must be overcome, and they apply to data ownership and credibility assessment of data sources. This is despite the data being protected once it's on the blockchain, the party sending the details to the blockchain is approved to do so. Additionally, the authors placed forward some other drawbacks, generally applicable to blockchain, which are existing transaction latency of the technology, restricted storage space, and 51 percent attacks.

Concluding comments

Based on Chiuchisan, Turcu & Turcu's paper (2019), the greatest potential of blockchain technology in the educational sector currently relates to solutions enabling trustworthy sharing of student and graduate data with various related parties. Such open data networks may provide a significant improvement in processes requiring global academic credentials verification.

The authors also signal the potential for higher-level solutions that could create large-scale, trustworthy learning networks that could change the educational face. However, issues related to legal enforcement and the security of the blockchain system must be addressed before such implementations can be applied, the details on these systems and organisations issuing data to potential education networks.

While there is the potential of blockchain technology in education and early platforms and implementations are being introduced, more practical and scholarly exploration and experimentation is needed.

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