Learning System based on Decentralized Learning Model using

Blockchain and SNS

Masumi Hori

, Seishi Ono

, Kensuke Miyashita

, Shinzo Kobayashi

, Hiroki Miyahara

Toshihiro Kita

, Tsuneo Yamada

and Kazutsuna Yamaji

NPO CCC-TIES, Nara, Japan

Kyoto Women’s University, Kyoto, Japan

SmileNC&Co., Japan

University of Yamanashi, Kofu, Yamanashi, Japan

Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan

The Open University of Japan, Makuhari, Chiba, Japan

National Institute of Informatics, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan

kita@rcis.kumamoto-u.ac.jp, tsyamada@ouj.ac.jp, yamaji@nii.ac.jp

Keywords:

Blockchain, E-book, SNS for Learning, Open Education.

Abstract:

Learning needs to transcend traditional school education to cover the whole array of learning available, such as

advanced technology, arts, or sports so that people can keep learning, training, and practicing at their own pace

throughout their life. To fulﬁll these needs for learning, we have constructed CHiLO, a decentralized learning

system, which utilizes e-books. We are now developing an entirely new learning system using blockchain to

solve the issue regarding the copyright of CHiLO and to build a new learning model utilizing virtual currency.

This paper reports the ﬁrst phase of the implementation details of the new system, which allowed the ownership

rights of the blockchain assets to be managed to create e-books by combining the posts on the SNS and paying

in virtual currency.

1 INTRODUCTION

Developments in science and technology have high-

lighted the difﬁculties with the centrally managed

centralized architecture of basic infrastructure such as

water, energy, transportation, medical care, law enfor-

cement and education.

Shrier (2016) claimed that centralized architecture

is now outdated, which was developed initially to deal

with the needs of the government and large enterpri-

ses during the industrial revolution in the 18

and 19

centuries.

Berners-Lee (2017) points out that the openness

and creativity of the Web are threatened by the cen-

tralized architecture of the current Web services. Web

service providers such as Google and Facebook re-

quire users to agree to a long and sophisticated con-

tract to gather and manage their personal information

and data in ex-change for the convenient and free ser-

vices that they provide, using those data for their mar-

keting. Also, many Learning Management Systems

(LMSs) that have expanded with the spread of the

Internet adopt a centralized learning model. Much

of online education using LMS has the deﬁnite ro-

les of teachers and learners; teachers determine le-

arners learning processes as well as learning materi-

als. This teacher-centered learning model worked as

a very useful tool, which succeeded in efﬁciently le-

ading learners to their learning goals and helped the

teachers to prevent resource depletion. However, the

system only contributes indirectly to the success of

the learning (EDUCOURSE., 2015).

The disadvantage of conventional teaching and

learning is that it also depends on the centralized

architecture from a centralized school/university sy-

stem (Illich, 1973). Traditional school and teacher-

centered education can no longer respond ﬂexibly to

the diverse learning needs, technological advances,

and uncertain issues currently sought by society.

To solve this problem, we developed a decen-

tralized architecture for an e-learning platform cal-

led Creative Higher Education with Learning Objects

Hori, M., Ono, S., Miyashita, K., Kobayashi, S., Miyahara, H., Kita, T., Yamada, T. and Yamaji, K.

Learning System based on Decentralized Learning Model using Blockchain and SNS.

DOI: 10.5220/0006666901830190

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018), pages 183-190

ISBN: 978-989-758-291-2

183

(CHiLO) that utilizes encapsulation technology to

produce an EPUB3 format e-book that retrieves con-

tent resources from the Internet to create the educatio-

nal materials, and can be distributed on the web (Hori

et al., 2016). Certainly, the major challenge with

CHiLO is the copyright issue related to extracting

content resources from the Internet. To solve this pro-

blem, CHiLO adopted a blockchain smart property to

manage the Internet resources as an asset and record

them in the blockchain, which is called the CHiLO

Chain.

Adapting blockchain, which is a basic virtual cur-

rency technology, to the learning environment could

be a paradigm shift in education to incentivize lear-

ners. This research is aimed at constructing a lear-

ning system that functions as a means of distribution

to disseminate knowledge to society and an indicator

of personal knowledge and experience.

Currently, as the ﬁrst phase of the research, we

have solved the issue regarding the copyright of

CHiLO Book using smart property.

Figure 1 shows the structure of the CHiLO Chain.

An article posted on social networking sites (SNS) is

an Internet resource for the creation of CHiLO. Using

the SNS as a user interface, the posted article is recor-

ded in blockchain, and by combining the stored arti-

cles, an e-book is compiled and issued. The CHiLO

Chain has adapted Mastodon for the SNS and Hyper-

ledger Fabric as the blockchain protocol. In this pa-

per, we report on the implementation of the CHiLO

Chain.

Figure 1: CHiLO Chain.

2 RELATED WORK

2.1 Decentralized Web

The decentralized web is a semantic web feature pro-

posed by Berners-Lee that has P2P (Peer to Peer) ser-

vice networks, for example, the extensible messaging

and presence protocol (XMPP), Gnu Social, and Git.

Berners-Lee et al. (2016) claimed that today’s web

has moved away from the concepts behind the ori-

ginal web technology and has become increasingly

more centralized, and highlighted the following main

problems.

The following problem are indicated:

(1) Silos: Personal content has become enclosed in

services that are provided exclusively by a speci-

ﬁc corporate company.

(2) Privacy: In exchange for useful services, perso-

nal information is being used for corporate com-

pany purposes such as marketing.

(3) Persistence: When a speciﬁc company stops

their service, the data disappears.

2.2 Blockchain

Blockchain is a decentralized architecture containing

P2P-connected computers (Nakamoto, 2008), each of

which shares a ledger. Blockchain was the funda-

mental technology developed to deal with encrypted

electronic currency such as Bitcoin

, which was the

ﬁrst social blockchain implementation. Bitcoin has

been in operation since March 2008 and has not suf-

fered from any damage such as tampering, indicating

that blockchain services are tamper resistant, authen-

tic, and persistent. As Bitcoin can be traded without

any third-party intervention, it has been studied wi-

dely in the ﬁnance domain.

Kahle (2015) noted that the technical advantages

of blockchain would be a key component of the next

generation web as it would overcome the problems

associated with current centralized web services and

has distinct advantages, as follows:

Transparency: Anyone can refer to the ledger re-

cords, and it is possible to check the data changes

and additions by tracking the transaction informa-

tion recorded in the ledger in a chronological or-

der.

Anonymity: Access to the blockchain is by a unique

character string “address”; therefore, no personal

information is required, and as long as the prin-

cipal does not disclose their address, the recorded

data cannot be used to identify individuals.

Availability: The distributive ledger system is sto-

red on different computers and continues to run

even if some systems become inoperable.

Tamper Resistance: Computers in the blockchain

network form a consensus and transaction infor-

mation source providing information remittance

sources, remittance amounts, and remittance des-

tinations. Furthermore, the time stamp recor-

ded in the ledger is in chronological order and

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184

is always maintained for consistency. With this

mechanism, the recorded transaction information

cannot be traced back to any person or organiza-

tion.

Authenticity:As the address of the user issuing the

transaction using an encryption key is digitally

signed, the authenticity of the transaction executor

is guaranteed unless the encryption key is stolen.

In this research, we focus on the realization of

smart properties. The virtual currency balances and

the transactions are recorded to each ledger in the

Bitcoin protocol; that is, reliable transactions are

deployed without any third-party intervention. The

smart property concept is that the data representing

the assets, rather than the virtual currency, are recor-

ded in each ledger. A transfer of the ownership of

the asset can be realized by changing the owner of the

data in each ledger. Then, expensive assets such as

stocks, land, and precious metals can be traded wit-

hout the need for third-party organizations; therefore,

it can signiﬁcantly transform social structures (Swan,

2015).

2.3 Smart Properties

The original protocol of the blockchain such as Bit-

coin, which records the transaction of virtual currency

with the balance of the virtual currency possessed by

the user, can be relied upon without going through a

third-party organization such as a bank and realizes

the transfer of virtual currency.

In addition, a more recent protocol called smart

property as a part of the attribute of the blockchain

can have data representing an asset and unique data

associated with the asset, and the assets owner can be

rewritten by the property transfer. Using smart pro-

perty, the attempt to transfer ownership of assets is

also expanding.

Transactions with smart property do not medi-

ate third-party institutions for high-value assets such

as stocks, land, and precious metals, thereby signiﬁ-

cantly transforming social structures (Swan, 2015).

2.4 Application of Smart Property

An example of the application of smart property is

the attempts being made to manage the copyright of

digital contents as an asset in a blockchain.

Binded (https://binded.com/) provides authorship

certiﬁcation services for image ﬁles. When the creator

sends the image ﬁle to the Binded system, creation

date and author are recorded in the blockchain, and

the author can prove his/her authorship.

Furthermore, similar image ﬁles on the Internet

are automatically displayed so that unauthorized di-

version monitoring can be performed. With this, Bin-

ded can assert rights by recording in the blockchain if

there is a dispute about the attribution of the copyrig-

hted work.

2.5 Application of Blockchain to

Education

The application of blockchain to education has the

possibility of changing traditional online education

such as MOOCs, and could even have a signiﬁcant

inﬂuence on regular school systems (Swan, 2015).

Currently, blockchain is being used to issue and

manage academic credentials or certiﬁcations. In

Holberton School (a computer school in San Fran-

cisco) and Ngee Ann Polytechnic (a vocational col-

lege in Singapore), students record their academic

credentials in the blockchain, manage them as their

learning outcomes, and use them for job-hunting pur-

poses (Campbell, 2016; Rohaidi, 2017). MIT Me-

dia Lab has also developed a certiﬁcation manage-

ment system in collaboration with Learning Machine,

which is now available as open source software.

More in-depth applications have also been propo-

sed. The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has the slo-

gan “Learning is earning,” and predicts that learning

transactions will take place in blockchain within ten

years. Speciﬁcally, learning in public education, the

Internet, SNS communication, or from life experience

can be traded as assets in virtual currency (ACT Foun-

dation, 2016). This demonstrates the possibilities of

an future education provided by blockchain; however,

to date, the IFTF has not speciﬁed it as a particular

method.

3 CHiLO

3.1 CHiLO’s Architecture

CHiLO designed speciﬁcally as a decentralized ap-

plication that does not require a centrally managed

Server can be distributed through general e-bookstore

such as the Apple Store

and Google Play

, and

can be delivered through any web server including

LMS. In addition, the e-book reader application is

designed to be browsable even from a web browser.

Therefore, the design of CHiLO has realized the con-

struction of an online learning environment that is

oriented toward a decentralized architecture to deli-

ver highly ﬂexible online education without the need

to rely on a speciﬁc LMS.

Learning System based on Decentralized Learning Model using Blockchain and SNS

185

Even though CHiLO seems to be like an e-book

written in the EPUB3 format, the interior structure

has an encapsulated metadata to call for the educatio-

nal resources such as videos, quizzes, digital badges,

and video conferencing , and is distributed over the

Internet as an e-book.

Figure 2: CHiLO Chain.

Figure 2 shows an overview of the CHiLO content

capsule structure, which has a container metadata part

and an engine part.

The metadata part consists of the metadata for the

resource conﬁguration and the metadata to call the In-

ternet resources. In the metadata associated with the

conﬁguration of resources, data related to the compo-

sition of resources to be incorporated in the e-book,

such as display order and layout, are recorded. The

metadata to call the resources has an entity associated

uniquely with a resource such as a URL as the loca-

tion information and the title.

The engine part has an editing method that con-

verts the metadata into the EPUB3 format and a dis-

play method that displays the e-book on the web

browser.

3.2 CHiLO Challenges

The primary challenge with CHiLO is the need to

have a copyright license for some of the resources on

the Internet. Currently, CHiLO is provided under the

CC BY-SA license of Creative Commons, which is an

insufﬁcient mechanism for using the content of licen-

ses. Some people providing resources on the Internet

do not clearly indicate their copyright but often allow

their usage under certain conditions. It is necessary

to use resources from a range of copyright licenses

to acquire the diverse knowledge needed for CHiLO

from the wide range of Internet resources.

4 PROPOSED METHOD

4.1 Using Blockchain

There are two reasons for using blockchain n this re-

search.

One is to solve the challenges concerning the

property of the blockchain.

The other is to use virtual currency. The inherent

functions of the currency are the circulation, measure

of value, and preservation of value. This research

aims for these features of virtual currency indicating

personal knowledge and experience to serve as an in-

centive for knowledge acquisition and to function as

a means of distribution to disseminate knowledge to

society.

In this research, we ﬁrst solved the problem con-

cerning the copyright of CHiLO Book using smart

property.

4.2 Hyperledger Fabric

As shown in Figure 3, copyright management of e-

book materials and the e-book itself can be achieved

by recording the CHiLO content capsule structure on

the blockchain, which would include also the conﬁ-

guration of the resources in metadata format.

Figure 3: Implementation of Hyperledger Fabric.

The system is implemented using Hyperledger Fa-

bric, one of the open source blockchain protocols.

The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger Fabric, one

of the blockchain projects within Hyperledger, and

Digital Asset and IBM developed Hyperledger Fabric

initially by Cachin (2016). Hyperledger Fabric has a

key-value type data store called the world state, which

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186

describes the state of the ledger at a given point in

time, and a data area called chaincode, which descri-

bes the application level code and executes the pro-

gram. The system records the metadata for the re-

sources and the metadata for the conﬁguration of the

resources in the world state. In addition, access to

these data is controllable by describing the code in

the chaincode.

4.3 SNS

The system considers any article posted on the SNS

as an Internet resource and creates e-books by combi-

ning other posted articles. In this process, Mastodon,

which is distributed as an open source SNS and can

be customized, has implemented a mini-blog service

with a user interface similar to that of Twitter.

It has a characteristic that allows anyone to launch

a Mastodon server called “Instance” and provide a de-

centralized architecture-oriented service. Each Mas-

todon Instance provides its own operation and service.

The Instances are connected to each other, and In-

stance users can interact with each other.

Mastodon’s decentralized architecture is suitable

as a blockchain because it has the same functionality

as a decentralized architecture. Mastodon Instance

acts as a non-centrally organized user interface of the

blockchain, and federated function of Mastodon re-

alizes easy exchange of those learning contents with

other Mastodon Instances.

4.4 System Structure

As shown in Figure 4, the Mastodon Instance and Hy-

perledger Fabric collaborate via an Agent that imple-

ments the Bot function, the edit method, and the dis-

play method.

Create a user object, which Mastodon Instance

user account is the key, within the Hyperledger Fabric

world state to link with the Mastodon Interface user

account. Furthermore, the Bot of the Agent will de-

tect any post the user posts using the built-in account

in Mastodon Instance and records the post and its

resource conﬁguration to Hyperledger Fabric world

state recognizing the user as the owner.

The e-book is output using the editing method and

the display method, with the URL posted in the Mas-

todon Instance after the Agent obtains the data of the

posts and their resource conﬁguration recorded in the

world state.

Figure 4: SNS.

5 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

5.1 Recording Articles on Hyperledger

Fabric

To record an article on Hyperledger Fabric, the title of

the article is speciﬁed as a hash tag and an image or

a movie ﬁle is attached and posted to the article as an

inbuilt account “clip,” as follows. To post an article

to a speciﬁc Mastodon user, “@account” is written at

the top of the posted article.

Article log: @clip Article Body #article title

When a user posts an article, the Bot creates an

object that has the posted article information as a va-

lue in the world state. The data format of the object

in the posted article is shown in Listing 1. The object

of the article created in the world state consists of the

user ID and keys such as a Toot ID that uniquely re-

presents the posted article. The user’s ID is the ID of

the user’s object created in the world state.

1 type Resource struct {

2 ObjectType string ‘json:”docType”‘ //ﬁeld

for couchdb

3 ResourceId string ‘json:” ResourceId”‘ //

4 TootId string ‘json:”TootId”‘ //Article’s

TootID

5 TootText string ‘json:”TootText”‘ //Toot

Text

6 OwnerId string ‘json:”OwnerId”‘ //User ID

7 Title string ‘json:”Title”‘ //tag’s title

8 URL []string ‘json:”URL”‘ //Media URL

Learning System based on Decentralized Learning Model using Blockchain and SNS

187

9 Timestamp string ‘json:”Timestamp”‘ //

timestamp of enrollment

10 Update string ‘json:”Update”‘ //timestamp

of renewal

11 }

Listing 1: World State Post Article Object.

As shown in Figure 5, upon the successful crea-

tion of the object, the clip returns a transaction ID, a

timestamp, and the value of the object created in the

world state to the contributor.

To change the value of the article object recorded

in the world state, a response for the posted article is

posted to the clip. To prevent unauthorized changes

to the article object by a third party, the condition can

be changed only when the user ID responding to the

chaincode and the user ID recorded in the article ob-

ject are the same.

Figure 5: Record of articles in Hyperledger Fabric (Top:

posting articles, Bottom: responding to the completion of

registration from the clip).

5.2 Creating e-books

To create an e-book by combining the article objects

recorded in the world state, the articles required are

selected and combined and a response is sent to the

embedded user “book” as follows:

Creating an e−book: @book #e−book title

When a user submits an article from the Mastodon

account, the Bot records the data for the structure of

the posted article as an object in the world state. Lis-

ting 2 shows the data format for the object. Similar

to the object for the posted article, the object related

to the structure also has a user object ID as a key in

the world state, which uniquely speciﬁes the author of

the object. By selecting the article to combine and by

repeating the response, articles can be added to this

object. By adding a condition that the chaincode can

be changed only when the owner of the object and the

ID of the user contributing are the same, it is possible

to enable a condition wherein only the author of the

object can add an article.

1 // −−− Book Object −−− //

2 type Book struct {

3 ObjectType string ‘json:”docType”‘

4 BookId string ‘json:”BookId”‘

5 OwnerId string ‘json:”OwnerId”‘ //UserID

6 TootId string ‘json:”TootId”‘// TootText

7 AccessPolicy string ‘json:”AccessPolicy”‘

// Book

8 Timestamp string ‘json:”Timestamp”‘//

Tiemstamp of enrollment

9 Update string ‘json:”Update”‘// Timestamp

of update

10 Title string ‘json:”Title”‘//Titile of #tag

11 Value int ‘json:”Value”‘ // The book price

12 ResourceIds []string ‘json:” ResourceIds ”‘

// resource Ids as the book

13 SalesVolume int ‘json:”SalesVolume”‘ //

Sales for the book

14 }

Listing 2: Object relating to article structure of world state.

As shown in Figure 6, when the recording is

successful, the transaction ID, the timestamp, and the

value of the object related to the structure recorded in

the world state are returned from the book.

Figure 6: Creating an e-book (Top:posted article list, center:

response of Book creation, bottom:response to the comple-

tion of registration from the book).

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188

5.3 Purchase of e-books

The system pays a token to acquire an e-book; speciﬁ-

cally, it sends the following message to the embedded

user “book.”

Purchase e−books: @book BUY BOOK #e−book title

When the message is being sent, the Agent acces-

ses Hyperledger Fabric, which then processes the

buyer’s token according to the chaincode description,

such as transferring the purchaser’s token to the object

structure authors and the article object author, retrie-

ves the data and sends it to the Agent, which outputs

the received data to the e-book using the editing and

display methods, and returns the electronic book do-

wnload URL for the book (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Acquire e-book (Top:Purchase e-book,

Bottom:Response download URL from book).

Figure 8 shows the e-book downloaded from the

URL described in the message transmitted from the

embedded user “book.” As the format of the e-book

is EPUB 3, it can be displayed on a general EPUB3

reader.

6 DISCUSSION

In the system, the articles posted on Mastodon were

recorded in Hyperledger Fabric, the e-books were

produced by combining the articles, and the author of

the data recorded in Hyperledger Fabric. Access con-

trol was then performed, which included instructions

that the payment of a token was necessary for data

acquisition, and only the author had the authority to

change the data. The history of any data modiﬁcation

and data acquisition was tracked by the transaction ID

recorded in the blockchain.

Figure 8: Output e-book.

As a result, by introducing blockchain, the chal-

lenges concerning copyright in the CHiLO system

were resolved.

However, in the system, access restrictions have

not yet been imposed on the URLs to obtain the e-

books. Furthermore, once the e-books are acquired

and downloaded, they can be redistributed easily; the-

refore, strict copyright protection has not yet been

achieved. These problems will be resolved in the fu-

ture by making it possible to download only the e-

books from a dedicated local application and making

it difﬁcult to retrieve downloaded e-books.

At this time, this system handles the articles pos-

ted on Mastodon as resources. For articles posted on

other resources such as blogs, YouTube, and Face-

book, these can be incorporated into the e-books by

storing the IDs associated with the user’s objects on

the blockchain in an area that can only be written by

the author, such as the header, the body, and the key-

word ﬁeld of the resource.

7 CONCLUSIONS

By implementing the system using blockchain, se-

veral challenges have been overcome; (1) control-

led copyright management of the learning resources,

(2) easy composition of the e-books, (3) e-book tran-

sactions in virtual currency, and (4) the distribution of

e-books .

As a result, we conﬁrmed the feasibility of the

P2P distribution of e-books. As a blockchain-based

platform for higher education, Tapscott and Tapscott

(2017) envisioned three stages:

“The ﬁrst is content exchange. Professors

share ideas and upload their teaching mate-

rials to the Internet for others to use freely.

Learning System based on Decentralized Learning Model using Blockchain and SNS

189

The second is content co-innovation, where

teachers collaborate across institutional and

disciplinary boundaries to co-create new te-

aching materials using wikis and other tools.

By stage three, the college or university has

become a node in the global network of fa-

culty, students, and institutions learning col-

laboratively”

This research provided a basic demonstration of

the ﬁrst stage “content exchange” and demonstra-

ted the making of e-books while protecting copyright

using an SNS such as Mastodon. This system could

be used to develop a lifelong learning model where le-

arners can communicate with each other while compi-

ling their own ideas and learning outcomes into elec-

tronic books.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant

Number JP7H01844 and NII Joint Research Grant.

The authors would like to thank Enago

(www.enago.jp) for the English language review.

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