Will Distributed Ledger Technology Revolutionize Education?
Since the establishment of blockchain and its deliverance of many opportunities for with disruptive potentials, the question at the back of many minds have been numerous, this article is focused on answering some of those pressing questions.
Since the inception of blockchain and its deliverance of many opportunities for with disruptive potentials, the question at the back of many minds has been numerous. This article is focused on answering some of those pressing questions. In the education sector, the industry is yet to experience major impacts there have been many integrations of the blockchain technology.
Has there been any application of this technology in higher education today?
Yes, there are a handful of colleges around the world that have begun to test run blockchain technology in their systems, especially for the verification of the authenticity of academic credentials, especially certificates and degrees. This one aspect of higher education that the blockchain could really prove effective in because one of the very strong problems plaguing higher education systems around the world is the falsification of documents.
Other than this there have been other ways blockchain has been integrated into the system to ensure the stability and quality of higher education. One of those ways is the use of blockchain technology to issue credentials; this is currently being practiced in the University of Melbourne in Australia. The application of blockchain in this area is not just to ensure the authenticity of credentials, but to also give students in this institution access to the records from their learning institution so that they can be easily presented to co employers when they seek employment.
Looking into the future, other ways blockchain can still change and improve higher educational institutions?
The applications of blockchain above will prove fruitful in the refinement of higher education, in anyways. The most significant of these ways is the payment of on campuses, there are some institutions already doing this, Georgia institute of technology accepts Bitcoin as a form of tuition payment on campus.
Also, the use of blockchain could also enhance pedagogy - which has to do with the systems and practices that surround the impartation of knowledge- by supporting collaboration between different disciplines on a deeper level.
In addition to these, here are few other ways blockchain presents the system with so much potential:
The verification of data
All or most of the data in higher education are still paper-based, which makes the verification of data, quite cumbersome especially when it involves a large number of students, using blockchain in this area will not only reduce the cumbersomeness of verifying data but also make it impossible to be tampered with.
Management of data
This other area is quite similar to the first, though this one involves how data is managed rather than verified. Year after year thousands of students pour into the different higher educational institutions around the world, and all this data has to be processed, moved from faculty to faculty, which involves a lot of work and cost. Whereas if blockchain technology was applied in this field data can be collected and retrieved with a lot of ease, without having to pass through the bureaucracies which surround them at the moment.
Digital identification
In higher educational institutions and other similar institutions, there is a growing need for digital identity which at the moment is costly to run and not easy to verify. When or if blockchain is applied to digital identification, it will reduce the cost of identification and ensure that people who falsify their identities do not easily get away with it.
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