Blockchain technology is slowly changing the world, one sector at a time. Although cryptocurrencies are the most well-known use of blockchain technology, it is by no means the only one. Blockchain technology has been breaking barriers and bringing cross-industry solutions that go well beyond its initial financial and cryptocurrency focus, and now, in Education.
This research will tap into how blockchain is revolutionizing the Education sector.
Table of Contents
Explaining Blockchain
Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger that stores data and records transactions in its most basic form. Every member of the blockchain community has a copy of the data. The data is organized into blocks and protected with powerful cryptography, resulting in a data chain. Because the blockchain system architecture forbids changes to blocks, you can trace every action and event back to its source.
Moreover, a blockchain could record the parties’ agreements, credentials, transactions, and other digitally presented information. Because this information gets widely disseminated and very secure, the blockchain community can detect any effort at fraud. This process establishes confidence and transparency in any environment where the blockchain gets implemented.
The Most Significant Challenges Surrounding the Education Sector
The education sector is undergoing a paradigm shift. As a result, the following educational system weaknesses must get addressed:
Record-keeping practices: Academic records, certificates, and credentials get handled by educational institutions utilizing inefficient and paper-intensive procedures. Impersonation is a risk with these operations.
Tracking inefficient learner performance: Educational institutions use time-consuming, paperwork-intensive techniques to track students’ progress. Unfortunately, these protocols stifle the flow of information.
Manual Identity management processes: Educational institutions utilize manual identity management techniques to manage student identities. As a result, aside from making it difficult for students to keep track of their qualifications and certifications, forgery is quite a threat.
Ways for establishing accountability between teachers and students: A teacher puts in a lot of effort to ensure students finish their tasks according to set regulations. However, it may be difficult to commit this time to all students.
Transcript management: It is difficult for students to obtain academic records from educational institutions. Manual methods are to blame for this predicament.
Revolutionizing Education with Blockchain: Blockchain Use Cases
As established, the education industry continues to suffer the same problems that have plagued it for years. Fortunately, blockchain can positively improve education and alleviate these issues by delivering the concrete answers outlined as use cases below.
Record-keeping that is More Accurate and Transparent
Since an individual cannot change a stored file in the blockchain, a school’s registrar can create a student’s record once then never have to touch it again. After that, it is available to all educational system participants and can even get shared between institutions. Every work, assignment, school involvement, and extracurricular activity participation gets added to the student’s digital record as blocks, which you may view in the student’s profile. Teachers, counselors, and school officials can see their students’ progress from a wider view.
Besides student data, you can also use blockchain systems to monitor and facilitate school, college, and university accreditation, secure intellectual property rights, and eradicate diploma and transcript forgery. Moreover, educational records stored on the blockchain can be accessed and transmitted swiftly to other schools and organizations, including potential employers.
Tracking and Individualizing Learning Performance
Educators can leverage the openness of data when stored on the blockchain to better look after the performance of their students. With this openness of data, schools can completely tailor a learning environment for their students by utilizing smart contracts that utilize the data stored on the blockchain. This smart contract can automatically find where a student is struggling and notify their teachers to give the student extra help. Moreover, any information contained within a student’s blockchain file can be accessed by authorized parties across the entire school district.
This type of system might aggregate performance records on a district, state, and national level and enhance healthy competition among schools, colleges, and universities worldwide, with the ultimate goal of providing the greatest possible quality education.
Providing Incentives for Students and Instructors to Attain Better Outcomes
You can use cryptocurrency and tokenized credits to create efficient incentive systems to inspire students. This inspiration should urge professors to participate in the educational process by generating new learning materials and participating in research. You can create smart contracts to reward fulfilled activities with cryptocurrency.
Teachers will further motivate kids by awarding extra credit to top performers.
Finally, blockchain technology can take modern education to the next level by fully using gamification. You could use tokenized credits to pay off student loans, buy school supplies and other instructional resources, and cover additional educational costs.
Powering Student Accountability via Smart Contracts
Teachers can make students more accountable for completing their assignments by leveraging blockchain smart contracts. The smart contract spells out all assignment criteria, including the directions, conditions, due date, and deadlines. As the student completes assignments, the smart contract recognizes the completion of assignments and can automatically grant entry to the next section of the course, assign credit to the student, or grant the student a certificate of completion.
Ultimately, smart contracts can help provide highly personalized learning within a typical classroom setting and give the incentive factor that is sometimes lacking in traditional educational systems.
Introducing Lifetime Student Transcripts that can be Verified
Many people would agree that obtaining a transcript record is a lengthy process that involves numerous parties verifying credentials and compiling the entire academic record. Thankfully, blockchain has the potential to offer students an online digital transcript that they may access whenever they need it.
This verifiable student lifetime transcript might include all academic achievements and simplify credential verification, making student transfers between schools much easier.
Conclusion
Education is the root of all development. This truth is why this industry must be the most modern, and instructors must be on the lookout for new ideas all of the time.
In this context, blockchain gets projected to significantly impact education, providing benefits such as transparency, optimization, and the simplification of routine activities. It offers better record-keeping and greater motivation to learn and gain new abilities.
The education sector has a bright future ahead of it, and it will only be a matter of time before the world notices the great impact that blockchains may have on education.
Web3 describes a version of the internet where data will be interconnected in a decentralized way. Web3 is an umbrella that comprises various fields like semantic web, AR/VR, AI at scale, blockchain technologies, and decentralization. The core idea of Web3 moves along the lines of enabling decentralized ownership on the web.
A blockchain protocol is a set of underlying rules that define how a blockchain will work. Based on the underlying rules of the protocol it’s possible to build a business ecosystem. Usually, protocol’s rules comprise everything from how tokens can be issued, how value is created, and how interactions happen on top of the protocol.
In software engineering, a fork consists of a “split” of a project, as developers take the source code to start independently developing on it. Software protocols (the set of rules underlying the software) usually fork as a group decision-making process. All developers have to agree on the new course and direction of the software protocol. A fork can be “soft” when an alteration to the software protocol keeps it backward compatible or “hard” where a divergence of the new chain is permanent. Forks are critical to the development and evolution of Blockchain protocols.
A Merkle tree is a data structure encoding blockchain data more efficiently and securely. The Merkle tree is one of the foundational components of a Blockchain protocol.
The nothing-at-stake problem argues that validators on a blockchain with a financial incentive to mine on each fork are disruptive to consensus. Potentially, this makes the system more vulnerable to attack. This is a key problem that makes possible underlying blockchain protocols, based on core mechanisms like a proof-of-stake consensus, a key consensus system, that together the proof-of-work make up key protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
A 51% Attack is an attack on the blockchain network by an entity or organization. The primary goal of such an attack is the exclusion or modification of blockchain transactions. A 51% attack is carried out by a miner or group of miners endeavoring to control more than half of a network’s mining power, hash rate, or computing power. For this reason, it is sometimes called a majority attack. This can corrupt a blockchain protocol that malicious attackers would take over.
A Proof of Work is a form of consensus algorithm used to achieve agreement across a distributed network. In a Proof of Work, miners compete to complete transactions on the network, by commuting hard mathematical problems (i.e. hashes functions) and as a result they get rewarded in coins.
An Application Binary Interface (ABI) is the interface between two binary program modules that work together. An ABI is a contract between pieces of binary code defining the mechanisms by which functions are invoked and how parameters are passed between the caller and callee. ABIs have become critical in the development of applications leveraging smart contracts, on Blockchain protocols like Ethereum.
A Proof of Stake (PoS) is a form of consensus algorithm used to achieve agreement across a distributed network. As such it is, together with Proof of Work, among the key consensus algorithms for Blockchain protocols (like the Ethereum’s Casper protocol). Proof of Stake has the advantage of security, reduced risk of centralization, and energy efficiency.
Proof-of-Activity (PoA) is a blockchain consensus algorithm that facilitates genuine transactions and consensus amongst miners. That is a consensus algorithm combining proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. This consensus algorithm is designed to prevent attacks on the underlying Blockchain.
According to Joel Monegro, a former analyst at USV (a venture capital firm) the blockchain implies value creation in its protocols. Where the web has allowed the value to be captured at the applications layer (take Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many others). In a Blockchain Economy, this value might be captured by the protocols at the base of the blockchain (for instance Bitcoin and Ethereum).
A Blockchain Business Model is made of four main components: Value Model (Core Philosophy, Core Value and Value Propositions for the key stakeholders), Blockchain Model (Protocol Rules, Network Shape and Applications Layer/Ecosystem), Distribution Model (the key channels amplifying the protocol and its communities), and the Economic Model (the dynamics through which protocol players make money). Those elements coming together can serve as the basis to build and analyze a solid Blockchain Business Model.
Blockchain companies use sharding to partition databases and increase scalability, allowing them to process more transactions per second. Sharding is a key mechanism underneath the Ethereum Blockchain and one of its critical components. Indeed, sharding enables Blockchain protocols to overcome the Scalability Trilemma (as a Blockchain grows, it stays scalable, secure, and decentralized).
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) operates autonomously on blockchain protocol under rules governed by smart contracts. DAO is among the most important innovations that Blockchain has brought to the business world, which can create “super entities” or large entities that do not have a central authority but are instead managed in a decentralized manner.
Smart contracts are protocols designed to facilitate, verify, or enforce digital contracts without the need for a credible third party. These contracts work on an “if/when-then” principle and have some similarities to modern escrow services but without a third party involved in guaranteeing the transaction. Instead, it uses blockchain technology to verify the information and increase trust between the transaction participants.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are cryptographic tokens that represent something unique. Non-fungible assets are those that are not mutually interchangeable. Non-fungible tokens contain identifying information that makes them unique. Unlike Bitcoin – which has a supply of 21 million identical coins – they cannot be exchanged like for like.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to an ecosystem of financial products that do not rely on traditional financial intermediaries such as banks and exchanges. Central to the success of decentralized finance is smart contracts, which are deployed on Ethereum (contracts that two parties can deploy without an intermediary). DeFi also gave rise to dApps (decentralized apps), giving developers the ability to build applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
The history of Bitcoin starts before the 2008 White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. In 1989 first and 1991, David Chaum created DigiCash, and various cryptographers tried to solve the “double spending” problem. By 1998 Nick Szabo began working on a decentralized digital currency called “bit gold.” By 2008 the Bitcoin White Paper got published. And from there, by 2014, the Blockchain 2.0 (beyond the money use case) sprouted out.
An altcoin is a general term describing any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. Indeed, as Bitcoin started to evolve since its inception, back in 2009, many other cryptocurrencies sprouted due to philosophical differences with the Bitcoin protocol but also to cover wider use cases that the Bitcoin protocol could enable.
Ethereum was launched in 2015 with its cryptocurrency, Ether, as an open-source, blockchain-based, decentralized platform software. Smart contracts are enabled, and Distributed Applications (dApps) get built without downtime or third-party disturbance. It also helps developers build and publish applications as it is also a programming language running on a blockchain.
An imaginary flywheel of the development of a crypto ecosystem, and more, in particular, the Ethereum ecosystem. As developers join in and the community strengthens, more use cases are built, which attract more and more users. As users grow exponentially, businesses become interested in the underlying ecosystem, thus investing more in it. These resources are invested back in the protocol to make it more scalable, thus reducing gas fees for developers and users, facilitating the adoption of the whole business platform.
Solana is a blockchain network with a focus on high performance and rapid transactions. To boost speed, it employs a one-of-a-kind approach to transaction sequencing. Users can use SOL, the network’s native cryptocurrency, to cover transaction costs and engage with smart contracts.
In essence, Polkadot is a cryptocurrency project created as an effort to transform and power a decentralized internet, Web 3.0, in the future. Polkadot is a decentralized platform, which makes it interoperable with other blockchains.
Launched in October 2020, Filecoin protocol is based on a “useful work” consensus, where the miners are rewarded as they perform useful work for the network (provide storage and retrieve data). Filecoin (⨎) is an open-source, public cryptocurrency and digital payment system. Built on the InterPlanetary File System.
BAT or Basic Attention Token is a utility token aiming to provide privacy-based web tools for advertisers and users to monetize attention on the web in a decentralized way via Blockchain-based technologies. Therefore, the BAT ecosystem moves around a browser (Brave), a privacy-based search engine (Brave Search), and a utility token (BAT). Users can opt-in to advertising, thus making money based on their attention to ads as they browse the web.
Uniswap is a renowned decentralized crypto exchange created in 2018 and based on the Ethereum blockchain, to provide liquidity to the system. As a cryptocurrency exchange technology that operates on a decentralized basis. The Uniswap protocol inherited its namesake from the business that created it — Uniswap. Through smart contracts, the Uniswap protocol automates transactions between cryptocurrency tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
