Over the last decade, technology innovations in education have been increasingly popular, as evidenced by the expansion of platforms that connect educators with students, such as Coursera and Skillshare, as well as the expansion of language teaching platforms. Blockchain technology is an unique general-purpose technology that has the potential to revolutionise data storage and transfer.

Its potential has been tested in a range of businesses and sectors over the last few years, and education is one of the professions where technology may deliver genuine benefits.

Education has largely gone unnoticed in the emergence of the blockchain space. That is why Iuliana Chiuchisan, Cornel Turcu, and Cristina Turcu conducted research on existing literature to assess current trends, opportunities, and challenges of bringing blockchain solutions to the educational sector, the findings of which were presented in their paper "Blockchain and its Potential in Education." The authors of the report were concerned with two major issues:

What are the most promising blockchain applications in the field of education?

What are the outcomes that have been recorded?

Benefits of Blockchain Education

Undergraduate and graduate academic documents, such as diplomas, degrees, and extra data, are often stored in the central database of the issuing school. Students and graduates are unable to access their own records as a result of this configuration. External parties requiring academic record certification, such as employers, governments, and other organisations, may find the process hard and time-consuming. It's pricey in a world where students and workers are more mobile. While authenticating such records is becoming more important, multiple studies have found that a considerable percent of resumes contain incorrect information regarding individual academic track records, as noted by the Risk Advisory Group.

Unrelated parties can record and distribute information using blockchain technology. Each partner keeps a copy of the information, which can be changed at any time. The technology provides a trustworthy, immutable, auditable, and self-regulating record-keeping system with an encrypted database that does not require a controlling authority (Atzori, 2017). (Wright and De Filippi, 2015).

As a result, blockchain technology will provide a secure means for storing and validating academic credentials that is accessible to anyone without the risk of tampering with records (Baba et al., 2018). Furthermore, centralised information systems, which are often utilised in educational institutions, are subject to data breaches, a problem that blockchain technology can address (Efanov & Roschin, 2018).

Aside from greater data security, blockchain has the potential to interchange data between unrelated parties, allowing different educational institutions and entities that require academic credentials validation to use trusted authentication mechanisms. Only universities can generate and amend data on the distributed ledger, ensuring that only the issuing party can make changes. Once the data has been posted to the blockchain, stakeholders can readily assess it.

Several further opportunities in educational blockchain technology have been proposed. The European Science and Knowledge Commission has published a Blockchain and Education research, which examines the possibilities of blockchain in credential issuance, accreditation verification, lifelong learning passports, intellectual property, and data management.

Other scholars, such as McArthur (2018), see blockchain as having the ability to reorganise the higher education system, and Tapscott and Tapscott (2017) see software as having the ability to revolutionise higher learning through a trustworthy worldwide network. Through disintermediation, blockchain-based education systems might, for example, create a peer-to-peer worldwide learning network. All parties could benefit from a trusted, open information system.

Finally, the benefits of blockchain technology in automated and highly secure software procedures would minimise administrative costs and bureaucracy for educational institutions, according to MacArthur (2018).

Earlier work

Several companies have begun testing blockchain education system solutions. MIT, Texas University Austin, and Nicosia University, for example, have begun issuing diplomas on decentralised ledgers, while Sony has created a forum for a next-generation credential solution called Sony Global Education. With its Ethereum-based platform OpenBlockChain, the Open University Information Media Institute is likewise at the forefront of academic blockchain applications (Lemoie, 2017). OpenBlockChain is experimenting with open badges, which are digital certificates with embedded academic accomplishment info.

Risk and difficulty

The authors of the report also question blockchain solutions in education, which are mostly tied to technology in general. Compliance with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a major difficulty – GDPR was formed in response to a slew of large-scale data misuse instances and includes rigorous data privacy and autonomy laws ("right to be forgotten" protection). Blockchain implementations must be GDPR compliant, and as Smolenski (2017) notes, "the blockchain provides a chance not only to fulfil but to go beyond the European General Data Protection Regulation' commitment." According to Smolenski, "the blockchain eliminates the need to rely on a centralised authority to retain an accurate record of events" and "makes monitoring activities extremely difficult." However, the authors of the research note GDPR and other restrictions as limiting blockchain implementation, emphasising the need of data legislation compliance.

Other legal problems that blockchain technologies must overcome concern data ownership and the reliability of data sources. Despite the fact that the data is safeguarded once it is on the blockchain, the party transferring the information to the blockchain is authorised to do so. The authors also mentioned some other limitations that are generally applicable to blockchain, such as the technology's present transaction latency, limited storage space, and 51 percent assaults.

Finally, some thoughts

According to Chiuchisan, Turcu, and Turcu's (2019) research, the biggest potential of blockchain technology in the educational sector at the moment relates to solutions that enable the trustworthy sharing of student and graduate data with many linked parties. Such open data networks have the potential to significantly improve processes requiring global academic credential verification.

The authors also hint at the possibility of higher-level solutions that might result in large-scale, trustworthy learning networks that might change the face of education. However, questions about legal enforcement and the security of the blockchain system must be resolved before such implementations can be implemented, as well as the specifics of these systems and organisations issuing data to future education networks.

While blockchain technology has the potential to improve education and early platforms and implementations are being launched, more practical and scholarly study and experimentation is required.

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