Ways in which blockchain technology can be used in education.
Transparency
Using blockchain in educational setups can be very useful to retail transparency in exchanges. Its ledger technology can create a chronological list of events that have taken place in real-time and then verify transcripts based on that. Creating a full report card, such technology helps students be candid about their actual progress. At the basic level, such technology can also make students more responsible because they cannot rely on excuses anymore to get away with not doing their work. If the rule is to submit your homework via blockchain, you can hardly claim that you’ve lost it, or claim that the teacher failed it, or forgot to bring the notebook.
Incentivising
Blockchain can make education more exciting by slightly raising the stakes. It is predicted that pretty soon, students will earn incentives for payment of student loans on time or for performing well. Teachers could award high achievers with the cryptocurrency after significant achievements. Such tokenization can benefit education because incentives motivate people to work harder.
Accountability
Smart contracts are a thing that could be efficiently used to keep students and teachers responsible and hold them accountable for their actions. There is no scope of claims of unjust, unfair treatments if all students enter into a smart contract with the professor about due dates of assignments, grading deadlines and other similar parameters. Smart contracts are digital agreements that can also be used to keep track of student loan payments.
Blockchain is secure, distributed, decentralized ledgers, which could be applied in many fields, including healthcare and education. Despite being known for its role in the cryptocurrency market, its many uses are just starting to come forward. Keeping copies of the same ledger in different places, when all these copies are verified as the same as the original, is a great idea, and blockchain technology helps achieve precisely that.
Most of the ledgers used today to record students’ grades, progress, and loan payment details using specialized, usually centralized software. In the case of a blockchain, all the individual nodes keep an updated copy of the entire ledger and constantly keep verifying the integrity of all the documents.
How blockchain technology can change the history of education in Universities.
There are many instances in which blockchain technology can be deployed to change an antiquated education system for the better.
Student records
Managing transcripts is one of the most time consuming and laborious tasks which plague the staff of universities today. Each entry must be manually verified for accuracy before a report card is issued and handed over to the student. Suppose the information regarding a student’s transcripts, performance and academic progress records are stored on a blockchain cloud storage system. In that case, they can be accessed easily with just a few clicks. It makes the administrative work that much easier.
Diplomas and certificates
The Diplomas and degree certificates earned by a student also could be issued and stored on a blockchain. The issuing of a digital degree has many benefits. Firstly, it prevents people from submitting fake degrees to their employees. Especially when the degree is embedded with a QR code, it becomes even more difficult for fraudsters to engage in identity theft. The other thing that it helps with is that in case of losses or damage of the paper copy, students may retrieve their degrees from the digital copy link without going through much hassle.
Identity cards and badges.
Student identity cards can be embedded with QR codes so that in case of identity theft and frauds, the institution’s authority in question can verify the student’s status by placing it against the details stored on the institute website.
As for badges, these could be collected throughout one’s academic life to authenticate other, probably relevant, achievements and talents someone has, which can be beneficial to a prospective employer in the future. Abilities such that they are not directly relatable to the academic degree one is pursuing but could be helpful to make them more employable.
Storage
The storage space required to store records, degrees, curriculum or other related information digitally, a lot of storage space has to be compromised. Local hard drives have the same issues which come with the traditional centralized system of filing. Blockchain-based cloud storage can be beneficial in such cases, and it also doesn’t need a lot of monetary investment either.
Publishing
Students at the undergraduate, postgraduate professors, and researchers continue to generate good quality material, but it isn’t that easy to publish the same. Scientific journals periodically reject even the best of academic work.
It is tremendously difficult to get your work out there, but using a blockchain to publish could help researchers and writers break the rejection cycle. Protection against plagiarism and intellectual property rights management can also be achieved by blockchain technology.
Courses
With the help of the intelligent contracts mentioned above, courses and lesson plans change programmed into a blockchain and then executed automatically in the presence of certain conditions. The smart contract will automatically verify each part’s completion. Upon full completion, professions would also receive payment I’m cryptocurrency, and students will be similarly awarded credits.
Advantages of using QR codes in Universities
Lowers cost and saves time
All those time consuming, cumbersome processes which were the cause of the troubles caused to professors and University staff could be automated. Since the processing takes less time, this also means that the amount of money spent on them will also be reduced and if the costs incurred by the university are less. Even the cost of storage and filing and hiring of intermediaries is drastically lowered. This means that the overall cost borne by the student will also lessen in amount.
Rewards
Using blockchain technology enables users to engage in cryptocurrency mining. This means that when people use blockchains to verify the integrity of information, they will be given tokens as rewards. These rewards can be traded on ‘safe cryptocurrency exchange’.
