An Overview of Blockchain for Higher Education

Timothy Arndt

Department of Information Systems, Cleveland State University, 2121 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH, 44118, U.S.A.

Keywords: Blockchain, Higher Education, Certification, Smart Contract.

Abstract: Blockchain technology is one of the most widely acclaimed technologies of recent years. It enables the

creation of distributed applications involving multiple actors or organizations in which transactions and data

are not under the control of a central authority. Transactions are stored in a distributed public ledger in an

immutable format in such a way that they can be verified by participants. This disintermediation promises to

remove much of the “friction” (and lower costs) from distributed transactions by cutting out the intermediary

party, thus enabling a variety of applications in finance, government, health, etc. This paper provides an

overview of recent research in the application of blockchain technology to higher education for those who are

interested in working in this area or just understanding how higher education may be positively impacted in

the future by blockchain.

1 INTRODUCTION

Blockchain was introduced in a paper published by

the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008

(Nakamoto, 2008) and subsequently deployed in the

cryptocurrency bitcoin in the following year.

Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can

efficiently record transactions between two parties in

a verifiable and immutable (permanent) fashion

without the need for a trusted third party

(disintermediation).

Bitcoin uses a peer-to-peer architecture and

relies on proof-of-work, a piece of data which is

difficult (time consuming, computationally) to

produce, but easy for others to verify (via “miners”

who are rewarded with bitcoin for this work) and

which satisfies certain requirements as a consensus

mechanism. Consensus mechanisms allow for the

correctness or “truth” of a transaction to be confirmed

(depending on a set of rules) when multiple

distributed actors may perform transactions, and

some of those actors may be untrustworthy.

Blockchain thus leads to what have been called

Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAOs).

Subsequent developments have allowed

blockchain to be programmed (via smart contracts) to

trigger transactions automatically (Iansiti and

Lakhani, 2017). As a foundational technology,

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6451-9918

blockchain has been used or proposed for use in

applications far beyond cryptocurrencies (Arndt,

2018), including banking (Peters and Panayi, 2016),

land registration – especially in developing countries

(Underwood, 2016), insurance (Lamberti, F., et al.,

2017), and online voting (Ayed, 2017). Alternative

consensus mechanisms (such as proof of stake and

mechanisms based on Byzantine Fault Tolerance)

have been proposed and alternative architectures used

(e.g. client-server). These variations may be more

useful in specific applications of blockchain. Some of

these variations and blockchain platforms using them

are discussed in the following section.

In this position paper, we give an overview of

some recent research on the application of blockchain

in the area of higher education, and our thoughts on

that research, for those who may be interested in

starting research in the area or who are interested in

understanding what is going there to see how it may

impact higher education in the future. As a position

paper, we make no claims to this being an exhaustive

review of research in the area. To dig deeper,

(Yumna, 2019) and (Yokubov, 2018) (related works

section) will be helpful. The best way to incorporate

the topic of blockchain into the higher education

curriculum for various academic disciplines

(computer science, information systems, finance,

business, etc.) is another interesting question, but is

not addressed by the research surveyed here.

Arndt, T.

An Overview of Blockchain for Higher Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0008343902310235

In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2019), pages 231-235

ISBN: 978-989-758-382-7

231

2 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

2.1 Types of Blockchain

There are currently three generally recognized types

of blockchain systems which differ in governance and

architecture (Zheng, 2017):

 Public Blockchain – all records are visible to the

public and everyone can take part in the consensus

process. Immutability is high in this type of

blockchain, but efficiency is low;

 Private Blockchain – belong to a specific

organization, and only nodes coming from that

organization are allowed to join the consensus

process. Compared to public blockchains, private

blockchains have lower immutability, but higher

efficiency;

 Consortium Blockchain – a combination of the

two previous types of system in which a pre-

selected group of users can participate in the

consensus process, and not all users belong to the

same organization. Immutability and efficiency

are similar to the private blockchain, while

consortium blockchain is intermediate in terms of

centralization between the decentralized public

blockchain and centralized private blockchain.

This type is also known as a permissioned

blockchain.

2.2 When Is Blockchain Useful?

Blockchain is a highly hyped, perhaps overhyped,

technology. It is not applicable to all projects.

Relational databases are a more stable, longer

established technology which meet the needs of

many, if not most, projects. On the other hand, there

are certain usage scenarios in which blockchain may

be applied. A good set of guidelines for when

blockchain may usefully be integrated into a project

has been given by (Greenspan, 2015). Specifically,

blockchain may be useful if the following conditions

hold:

 Shared Database – the project will require a

database to be used as a shared ledger;

 Multiple Writers – more than one entity will be

generating transactions which will be modifying

the database. Further, the writers will hold a copy

of the database and relay transactions in a peer-to-

peer fashion;

 Absence of Trust – users are not willing to allow

other users to modify the database entries which

they own;

 Disintermediation – the multiple non-trusting

entities want to operate without a centralized

trusted intermediary;

 Transaction Interaction – the transactions of

different users depend on those of others;

 Set of Rules – given the previous conditions, it is

logical that the database should embed rules

which restrict the transactions;

 Authoritative Transaction Log – the blockchain

serves as the final transaction log on whose

contents all users provably agree;

 Asset Store – the blockchain serves as a ledger of

real-world assets.

If all or most of these conditions hold, blockchain

technology may well be applicable and useful for

your project. Some reflection will show that many use

cases in education have these conditions. The projects

surveyed in the next chapter are examples of these

types of higher education use cases.

2.3 Blockchain Platforms

Several platforms for building blockchain systems

have been developed in recent years. Amongst the

most popular of these are the following:

 Ethereum – (Ethereum, 2019) is an open-source,

public blockchain platform first proposed by

Vitalik Buterin in 2013. Ethereum features Ether,

a token (cryptocurrency) which can be used to pay

for “gas”, a unit of computation performed by

smart contracts (scripts) which run on the

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Ethereum

supports a modified version of Nakamoto

consensus (Bitcoin’s consensus protocol).

Ethereum is widely used for the development of

Peer to Peer (P2P) Distributed (or Decentralized)

Apps (Dapps).

 Hyperledger Fabric – (Hyperledger Fabric,

2019) is a permissioned (private) blockchain

infrastructure developed by IBM and Digital

Asset which features a modular architecture,

smart contracts, and configurable consensus and

membership services. Besides being a private

blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric differs from

Ethereum in not having a built-in token, and in its

degree of configurability, among other items.

Hyperledger Fabric is one of a number of

“Hyperledger” projects developed under the aegis

of the Linux Foundation and is aimed at the

enterprise with a special significance for Business

to Business (B2B) applications.

 Corda – (Corda, 2019) was developed by the R3

blockchain technology company. Corda is an

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232

open-source distributed ledger and smart contract

platform developed with the needs of business in

mind. Like Hyperledger Fabric, Corda is

permissioned and does not have a native token,

however it is more specialized, aimed specifically

at the needs of the financial services industry.

 Openchain – (Openchain, 2019) developed by

CoinPrism is an open-source blockchain platform

for organizations that want to issue and manage

digital assets in a secure, and scalable manner.

Smart contracts are supported and partitioned

consensus is used so that users can create unique

instances that will have a single authority. Tokens

on Openchain can be pegged to Bitcoin.

Openchain uses a client-server architecture rather

than the more widely used blockchain P2P

architecture. There is also no miner required for

consensus, so transactions are instant and free.

 BigChainDB – (BigChainDB, 2019) is an open-

source distributed storage system which aims to

combine the advantages of NoSQL databases with

blockchain (distributed storage, immutability, no

central authority). BigChainDB is built out of

number of NoSQL database nodes (e.g.

MongoDB instances) which store immutable

information about transactions which are kept

synchronized by using the Tendermint Byzantine

Fault Tolerance (BFT) scheme for consensus.

BigChainDB can be either public, private, or

permissioned.

3 REPRESENTATIVE

BLOCKCHAIN IN HIGHER

EDUCATION PROJECTS

In this section we will look at some recent

representative projects in the application of

blockchain technology in higher education.

A number of researchers have explored the use of

blockchain to store university grades, i.e. university

transcripts. A group at the University of Glasgow has

developed a functional prototype for storage of

student grades at the institution (Rooksby, 2017). The

platform chosen was Ethereum, hence it was built on

a public blockchain. This was exploratory research,

and they identified several challenges, including in

the use of smart contracts to calculate grades in an

algorithmic manner. Another project giving a

prototype implementation is (Arndt, 2018), where a

private BigChainDB blockchain is used for storage of

student transcripts (not grades within a course as in

the previously described research, though). Initial

results were promising. (Yokubov, 2018) describes a

prototype implementation of a university transcript

system using an Ethereum private blockchain and

ERC-20 tokens (a standard for tokens, which are

needed to carry out smart contracts, on Ethereum) on

that blockchain. Students are able to read their grades,

while professors and administrative personnel can

record grades.

EduCTX (Turkanović, 2018) is an ambitious

project for the development of a higher education

credit platform based on the concept of the European

Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), a

framework which has been approved by the EU. The

decentralized higher education credit and grading

system can offer a globally unified viewpoint for

students, higher education institutions, and other

potential stakeholders such as prospective employers.

A prototype implementation has been built on the

ARK blockchain platform (ARK, 2019). ARK is a

public blockchain, but the researchers changed it to a

private (permissioned) one by taking advantage of the

flexible nature of ARK to change the parameters of

the consensus algorithm used – DPoS (delegate proof

of stake). Rules to ensure the validity of transactions

on the blockchain have been defined. ECTX tokens

are used to represents credits that students gain for

completing courses (analogous to the way that ERC-

20 tokens are used in the work above). The authors

propose to apply the prototype system firstly at their

home institution, the University of Maribor, and then

at a select set of institutions of higher education. They

anticipate that this or a similar system could

potentially evolve into a unified, simplified and

globally ubiquitous higher education credit and

grading system.

A more theoretical investigation is given in

(Kuvshinov, 2018) where the architecture for the

Disciplina platform for student records is given and

main issues arising from storing student records in a

blockchain are analysed. Their platform incorporates

both private blockchains (maintained by individual

institutions of higher learning and public blockchains,

managed by “Witnesses” who witness the fact that a

private block was produced by a valid institution. A

good discussion of the problems of privacy,

provability, and data disclosure in this context are

given in a theoretical manner.

Beyond traditional transcripts, blockchain is also

being used or proposed for various alternative types

of educational credentialing. Blockchain promises

permanent authentication and storage for a myriad of

alternative credentials made up of diverse

microcredentials, nanodegrees, MOOCs, and

certificates/badges from various types of training

An Overview of Blockchain for Higher Education

233

programmes. These credentials can then be directly

controlled and managed by users (Jirgensons, 2018).

Among the most well-known of these projects,

MIT’s Media Lab created Blockcerts, a mobile app

for educational credentialing built on Bitcoin (MIT,

2019). At the Open University, researchers have

developed the OpenLearn system built on the

Ethereum public blockchain which awards

OpenLearn badges for completing sections of a

course and passing assessments (OpenLearn, 2019).

The creators of that system are now working on a

blockchain project to create a permanent distributed

record of intellectual effort and associated

reputational reward that instantiates and democratises

educational reputation beyond the academic

community (Sharples 2016). Blockchain for

Education (Gräther, 2018) is another prototype

system supporting the storage, retrieval and

verification of certificates via blockchain technology.

Certificates are an important means of proving

lifelong learning achievement in today’s

environment, however they are susceptible to forgery.

Blockchain helps to solve this problem. The

prototype system uses Ethereum and its smart

contracts to manage identities of registered certificate

authorities and the hashes of certificates which are

stored in a separate, centralized document

management system, while the profile information of

certificate authorities is stored using the

Interplanetary File System (IPFS) distributed file

system. Storing data off the blockchain allows it to be

be deleted as is required, for example, by the

European General Data Protection Regulation

(GDPR) for personal information.

Other uses of blockchain in higher education have

also been contemplated, including motivation,

assessment, advising, etc. (Chen, 2018). A prototype

system for a blockchain based learning analytics

platform built on Ethereum has been proposed as well

(Ocheja, 2018).

4 CONCLUSIONS

One of the factors influencing the choice of a

particular blockchain platform is the availability of an

API in a particular language. Researchers will

naturally prefer a solution which allows them to

program in their chosen language. Ethereum has

proven to be a popular platform in higher education

projects due to its smart contracts and generalist

orientation, but other platforms have been widely

used as well.

Among the areas in higher education where

blockchain is currently being most widely used are a

pair of emerging application areas which involve

multiple, distributed actors, and which thus lend

themselves naturally to the use of blockchain as a part

of a system, namely for transfer of credits among

highly mobile students crossing international borders

(in the EU), and as a means of consolidating, new,

diverse educational credentials (certificates, badges,

MOOCs, etc.) in a more flexible, student-oriented

approach to lifelong learning. Other areas of higher

education could profit from the use of blockchain as

well, however the criteria given in section 2 should be

carefully considered before incorporating blockchain

in order to avoid using inappropriate technology

simply because it is new and “hot”.

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