How Global Education can be Revolutionized by Adopting Blockchain

Blockchain technology is today dominating almost every field whether be it oil and gas or medical, from land use to shipping, from banking to government. And, with this growth of the technology it is being predicted that the technology will disrupt almost every industry that is present today including the education too.

Blockchain technology has already knocked the doors of IT sector and along with this Bitcoin has made quite a headline for itself. The blockchain technology is building up a framework for cryptocurrency which is soon expected to be in the mainstream.

So, what exactly this blockchain technology do? Well this technology helps the user to maintain a record of the digital currency transactions without the presence of any central recordkeeping.

Education sector adopting blockchain technology

When it comes to education, we can observe that there has been no change in the basic structure and activities, the system is as such as it was way back. The student has to attend school at certain age and same curriculum is delivered all around them. There is no change observed even in the college same method of professor giving notes, students cramming them and scoring and then grades being rewarded.

A very little change has been observed in the field despite of various attempts that have been made to reform the field.                                

Enter MOOCs

It is quite a common name for online coursework which is offered by quite big universities in which students can enrol themselves in and these courses are often free of charge.

In this instead of the actual credits there is the procedure of providing the student the certificate which they can add up to their resumes and thus these certificates can be looked over or act as proof for the knowledge and skills of the student.

So, what does blockchain have to do with all this?

Blockchain is mostly used for the trading of cryptocurrency and now its branches have reached to several new fields. Blockchain keeps a permanent record of the activities. The activity that is performed is firstly entered in box of activity and is then linked to the block before it and the block following- Verification of these blocks is then performed by several people and these can also be made public and they are permanent as no alteration can be made in the data once entered.

Basically, blockchain is a permanent ledger and thus all the educational data along with various training activities and experiences can be made art of this permanent ledger.

With the help of this blockchain technology a ledger that will be a verifiable proof of a person’s education history can be made as it is incorruptible ledger and would follow individuals throughout their lives.

The power of the traditional brokers will be dissolved with the introduction of blockchain technology in the sector.

But the largest disruption that this blockchain technology will bring up is that people can pursue learning of whatever they want to regardless of their respective ages and thus it will bypass the traditional method of education. And with this it will help in bringing up the reform in the educational field and its high time that this action must be taken.

There are places which have accepted these reforms.

For example MIT, The university of Nicosia in Cyprus and the Holberton School for Software Engineering they have accepted the blockchain technology as they are awarding the students the course completion certificate with the help of blockchain technology.

Tutellus

It is a platform that has over 120,000 course videos about every subject. This platform also award its users for learning.

Today Tutellus has more than a million users.

Tutellus uses a four layer architecture to accommodate the traffic of these huge number of viewers. The layer includes-

• Multi-platform application- The function of this layer is to store the apps along with decentralization of the services.
• Microservices API-  It provides additional functions to the services.
• Token- The tutellus TUT.
• Blockchain- It is the database where all the documents of the users are stored and also the smart contracts.

Sony Global Education

The Sony corporation and the Sony Global Education has developed this platform . With the help of this platform students educational data from several schools can be maintained. Also it help the learners to store their own evidence of formal and informal learning, share it with a desired audience and ensures instant verification. Also it provides the feature of transferring the data from one institute to the another and acts as a single repository to store the information.

BitDegree

A company named BitDegree.org has launched a program called BitDegree by observing this potential of the blockchain technology. The basic idea behind launching of this program is to provide  various incentives and skills that are in demand. With the completion of the course, Bitdegree tokens are provided to the individual which can be used as scholarship money for some additional coursework.

With the help of BitDegree potential employees can also be found out. When it comes to India, Unacademy has established itself as a medium for building up a collaborative e-learning environment for students and teachers.

Blockchain Effect on traditional educational institutions

The world of internet is dominating the education sector today. A vast amount of knowledge and skills can be acquired through Internet which have attracted individuals more towards it rather than the traditional institutions and it is predicted in the nick of time the blockchain technology will take over the entire education sector and the role of the traditional institutions will be reduced to none.

With the help of the blockchain technology, educators all around the world can come together and collaborate with each other and with the employers. Hence, they can provide the students the learning with which they can improve their knowledge and skills. Also, it will help them attain new career heights. The traditional institutions have to either adopt the new technology or it will vanish away in no time.