2EDU #21. Blockchain in Education = end of cheating and many more.

The Better understanding of how individuals learn, seamless identification if students, easy maintenance of ePortfolio of formal and informal education, all reliable, available and bulletproof – it seems like a nice science-fiction story, but this is what it is going to happen in the very near future with the usage of blockchain technology. What are the other benefits where learning and education can benefit from learning technology? 1. Identification of individuals is from my perspective the most interesting area. At the moment we often use encryption keys to validate the person, but it has some disadvantages. The blockchain is much more reliable and gives more chance that the person in front of you is the one identified by the software.2. Storing educational history (ePortfolio) for each citizen starting from schools and universities, but also taking into consideration all learning activities that happen outside of the formal education. It all can be combined into one large educational profile, expanded with the marks, subjects, school data, and all of this may be time-stamped and versioned. With blockchain we can store much more data and as a result, have a much better way of understanding learning of the individuals and groups. 3. Learning programs exchange and rating – when we will use blockchain to store educational curriculums it will allow them to be easily compared and a quality check will be much easier than at the moment. So you can imagine that comparing Advanced Physics of one of the Polish Universities with similar or the same course at MIT will be possible so that you can check which course better suits your needs. This can be also a very good tool for checking the quality of curriculums at the national or wider level. 4. Protection of rights for the research work – looking at the academia, still most of the work is not about teaching others but about research. One of the problems is publishing of scientific articles, especially knowing who the first to publish particular solution was. With blockchain and its timestamp feature, it will no longer be a problem. 5. Referencing source materials – this is another fragile topic when talking about science and research. When you look at books, they are quite stable if you think about how often the information in the changes, so you can easily quote or refer them in your publications, but what about the newest publishing. There is no way that you can refer a website and be sure that it will be still available in 2 years. Moreover, you cannot be sure about the content. The author may change it and your reference will be no longer valid. In case of blockchain, you can store all references with the specific timestamps and be sure that it will be available in future.