Blockchain technology is a recent mainstream trend. However, many people believe that Blockchain is just about Cryptocurrency, which is not the case. Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies are just a part of Blockchain technology as a whole. Apart from Cryptocurrencies, it uses various other fields such as healthcare, supply chain, logistics, advertising, etc.
It’s a decentralized digital ledger that keeps track of any transaction through a global network of computers. Various businesses are searching for Blockchain platforms to build top-level business strategies, driving up the market for blockchain technology. Blockchain’s amount of protection and transparency is the primary explanation for its tremendous rise in popularity.
Blockchain is the focus technology applied to create cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. As part of the industrial revolution since the steam engine, power, and information technology, blockchain technology has been implemented in finance, courts, and commerce.
History of Blockchain
Blockchain is the hub technology used to build the Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, by controlling immutable distributed ledgers in thousands of nodes introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Since the steam engine, electricity, and information technology, it has been deemed part of the fourth industrial revolution. This disruptive technology will significantly impact national governance, institutional capacities, business transactions, education, and daily subsistence in the 21st century.
Blockchain technology is assumed to transform the operating styles of commerce, industry, and education and promote the rapid development of a knowledge-based economy on a global scale.
Potential Effects of Implementing Blockchain Technology
It is indisputable that there are potential hindrances to implementing blockchain technology in education. As a complex system, some education behaviors and learning issues need to be evaluated subjectively, such as essays and classroom presentations. It is pretty hard to assess this learning activity by the pre-programmed intelligent contract without human intervention.
If an educational blockchain system were used in schools, all students’ academic data would be integrated into blockchain ledgers. However, the immutability feature of blockchain technology would act as a double-edged sword. First, it removes the possibility of modifying educational records for legitimate grounds for few students.
Furthermore, several technical barriers or issues are not addressed for the Blockchain to be employed in education. For instance, the classic Proof of Work consensus mechanism wastes energy and has a mediocre performance in terms of the number of transactions per second, which would cost an extra expense, and prevent its application in schools.
Blockchain is a shared ledger technology that employs cryptography techniques and distributed consensus algorithms. It creates the features of decentralization, traceability, immutability, and currency properties. Its currency properties have the potential to trigger many innovative administrations for education. For instance, by realizing “learning is earning,” blockchain technology can promote students’ learning motivation. In addition, it can save a complete, accurate set of records of educational activities, including the methods and results of informal and open learning environments. It can also record teachers’ instruction behaviors and execution, thus contributing a recommendation for teaching evaluation.
In a word, for both students and teachers, Blockchain has numerous potential applications in instructional perspective, behavior reporting, and analysis, as well as developmental evaluation. At the same time, it takes challenges and possibilities to researchers, developers, and instructors.
For researchers, Blockchain has extraordinary potential to be broadly applied in education. However, microscopic investigations have been carried. It would be stimulating to study more approximately on topics like what possibilities can it allow for an education revolution? It is better to utilize the digital currency assets to enhance learning impulses and achievements.
These creative concepts are just the initial steps of applying Blockchain into training for developers. It is also an indispensable part of developing educational platforms and software, which brings challenges for developers. For example, how to create a blockchain platform that matches users’ personalized requirements? How to combine hardware with Blockchain to build an environment for data retrieval and recording? How to manage a comprehensive volume of institutional transaction data and blend blockchain technology into the current educational tools and practices?
For educators, some advantages of embracing blockchain technology to design intelligent contact-based learning activities are brilliant contract-based learning activities can be verifiable, robust, and traceable. This transparency feature is vital protection for teachers who have done an excellent job. The school management has an evaluation of teaching performance should also be changed to embrace this new technology.
The realization of the 21st century’s privacy, trust, security, and equality can be achieved by blockchain technology. Security relates to the protection of relevant properties and data. Nowadays, some people have property but cannot determine ownership, such as intellectual property conflicts. It may lead to a struggle with others.
Blockchain technology can be practiced by holding the records in the database to determine the features. Some business information, like corporate planning, design drawings, may be stolen by industrial operatives. Blockchain technology can be used to guard these valuables transactions by recording data in a blockchain network. Furthermore, blockchain technology protects teachers’ instructional design from usurpation, thus improving intellectual property security.
Privacy means each node saves the complete ledger, including all the data except for the authentic identity. For the sake of secrecy, users’ credentials are all impersonated by ID numbers. It means that blockchain technology protects the trader’s privacy, as no one else would have the private key. All the learning experiences recorded on Blockchain can only be gained by its unique user’s private key in the education scenario. Others are not available, which indicates blockchain users’ privacy can be well assured.
As for assurance, blockchain technology can reconstruct people’s ways of building trust from the third-party institution to making it by technology. For example, teachers’ and students’ responses are registered and monitored when intelligent contracts and Blockchain are implemented. Thus, the trust between the subjects is based on the technology itself, not the third party.
Equality leads to the corresponding rights and opportunities that everyone owns on a blockchain network. Blockchain technology’s openness, borderless, and permissionless strengths can accommodate everyone’s fair access to the technology and the network created with it. Anyone can utilize an electronic wallet on the blockchain network. Blockchain technology does not establish any boundaries for the users. All institutions, teachers, and students can apply it daily, thus circumventing authority prejudice.