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A Blueprint for a Blockchain-Based Architecture to Power a Distributed Network of Tamper-Evident Learning Trace Repositories

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The need to ensure privacy and data protection in educational contexts is driving a shift towards new ways of securing and managing learning records. Although there are platforms available to store educational activity traces outside of a central repository, no solution currently guarantees that these traces are authentic when they are retrieved for review. This paper presents a blueprint for an architecture that employs blockchain technology to sign and validate learning traces, allowing them to be stored in a distributed network of repositories without diminishing their authenticity. Our proposal puts participants in online learning activities at the center of the design process, granting them the option to store learning traces in a location of their choice. Using smart contracts, stakeholders can retrieve the data, securely share it with third parties and ensure it has not been tampered with, providing a more transparent and reliable source for learning analytics. Nonetheless, a preliminary evaluation found that only 56% of teachers surveyed considered tamper-evident storage a useful feature of a learning trace repository. These results motivate further examination with other end users, such as learning analytics researchers, who may have stricter expectations of authenticity for data used in their practice.
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A Blueprint for a Blockchain-Based Architecture to Power a Distributed Network of
Tamper-Evident Learning Trace Repositories
Juan Carlos Farah1, Andrii Vozniuk1, Mar´
ıa Jes´
us Rodr´
ıguez-Triana1,2, Denis Gillet1
1´
Ecole Polytechnique F´
ed´
erale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
2Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
{juancarlos.farah,andrii.vozniuk,maria.rodrigueztriana,denis.gillet}@epfl.ch
Abstract The need to ensure privacy and data protection
in educational contexts is driving a shift towards new ways
of securing and managing learning records. Although there
are platforms available to store educational activity traces
outside of a central repository, no solution currently guarantees
that these traces are authentic when they are retrieved for
review. This paper presents a blueprint for an architecture that
employs blockchain technology to sign and validate learning
traces, allowing them to be stored in a distributed network
of repositories without diminishing their authenticity. Our
proposal puts participants in online learning activities at the
center of the design process, granting them the option to
store learning traces in a location of their choice. Using smart
contracts, stakeholders can retrieve the data, securely share
it with third parties and ensure it has not been tampered
with, providing a more transparent and reliable source for
learning analytics. Nonetheless, a preliminary evaluation found
that only 56% of teachers surveyed considered tamper-evident
storage a useful feature of a learning trace repository. These
results motivate further examination with other end users,
such as learning analytics researchers, who may have stricter
expectations of authenticity for data used in their practice.
Keywords blockchain, privacy, education, learning analytics
I. INTRODUCTION
The rise of digital education and learning analytics (LA)
has led to a significant increase in the amount of information
collected during educational activities [1]. This trend moti-
vates the development of new frameworks to safeguard edu-
cational data and the privacy of those concerned. Blockchain
technology has been specifically highlighted as having a
“potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice”,
particularly in the way learning records are managed [2].
The blockchain came to prominence with the rise of the
Bitcoin cryptocurrency [3], functioning as the distributed
ledger on which Bitcoin transactions are recorded. It employs
cryptographic functions to create an append-only, tamper-
evident log, where items get inscribed only if approved by
the majority of participants in the network. Over the past
few years, it has been proposed as the core building block
of decentralized applications in various sectors where user
privacy and data authenticity is paramount, including finance
[4], telecommunications [5], and healthcare [6], [7]. In edu-
cational settings, research has focused on the blockchain’s
potential to securely register badges and certificates [8],
recording and trading educational data and reputation [9],
and powering a platform for examinations [2], [10].
In this paper, we propose a blueprint for a system that uses
blockchain technology to validate the authenticity of learning
traces stored across multiple locations. A system based on
this blueprint would give participants in a learning activity
(e.g. students, teachers, institutions) control over where their
data is stored without undermining its validity, while also
supporting a more fine-grained and direct control over when,
how and with whom data is shared. By empowering users
with more control over their data, systems based on this
blueprint could address issues put forth by data privacy
regulations, such as the European General Data Protection
Regulation (EU GDPR 2016/679) [11], which introduces a
series of requirements regarding the collection and process-
ing of personal data to be met starting May 2018.
To assess the impact that this proposal could have on end
users, we conducted a survey of 25 teachers, capturing the
extent to which they considered the features derived from
our blueprint to be useful in their practice.
II. MOTIVATION AND RE LATE D WOR K
As underlined by Pardo and Siemens [1], there are ethical
and privacy issues that need to be considered when collecting
LA data, such as the responsibility to promote trust among
participants and accountability from those with access to that
data. Additionally, learning traces are predominantly stored
by the systems in which they occur. These systems are often
not interoperable, making data management and analyses
involving multiple data sources a more complex process [12].
The problem of private data stored distributively has been
already faced in the medical sector, where patient data is
often dispersed among various healthcare providers, and
privacy is of utmost concern [7]. An approach to tackle
this challenge is MedRec, developed by Azaria et al. at
MIT’s Media Lab [6]. MedRec is a platform that exploits
blockchain technology to create a network that manages
access permissions for electronic medical records. It allows
healthcare providers to store the data in their own databases,
but grants a way for patients to retrieve all of their records
across providers and share them with doctors or third parties.
A number of applications of the blockchain have also been
suggested for educational contexts. Among other proposals,
blockchain technology has been advocated as a way of
validating academic certificates [8] and to create a tradeable
currency out of educational achievements, as is the case of
Kudos [9]. Others present frameworks, protocols, and tools
that coalesce decentralized resources and learning environ-
ments (LEs), without applying the blockchain. These include
project ROLE’s Interoperability Framework [13], the Con-
nected Analytics Toolkit [12], architectures for integrating e-
portfolios in distributed LEs [14], and learning trace trackers
that focus on open learning platforms [15]. Nevertheless, no
system comprehensively provides a way to (1) allow data to
be stored outside of a central repository, (2) guarantee that it
has not been tampered with when it is retrieved for analysis,
and (3) integrate with multiple LEs.
These three limitations illustrate the challenges highlighted
by Tapscott and Tapscott [10], who argue that the blockchain
can be applied for innovation within higher education, specif-
ically in the management of identity and student records.
Within this domain, they put forth three challenges to be
addressed: (1) maintaining the privacy and security of data
stored, (2) assuring the validity of this information, and (3)
rewarding learning done outside of the formal classroom.
We map these challenges to three design dimensions for our
blueprint: (1) Data Ownership and Access, (2) Data Authen-
ticity and (3) Data Integration and Aggregation, respectively.
These dimensions define the main pillars of our blueprint.
III. DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
Our objective was to devise a distributed data store for
learning traces, exploiting blockchain technology to ensure
the privacy, authenticity, and accessibility of these records.
The guiding concern was that by giving users full control
over their data, they might be able to manually modify their
activity traces and thus rewrite their learning histories. In
order to avoid this, our approach was to apply the blockchain
as an immutable record to prevent educational data from
losing authenticity even when stored in a location controlled
by an untrusted third party. Centered on this concern, we
mapped the functionalities proposed to the challenges under-
lined by Tapscott and Tapscott [10], and grouped them under
the following three design requirements and approaches.
1. Data Ownership and Access.
Requirement: Learners, parents, teachers, institutions and
platform providers should all have a say in deciding where
the data is stored. Access permissions need to be signed by
the parties involved and could be temporary [11], meaning
stakeholders should be able to revoke access to the data.
Proposed Approach: Permissions are registered, updated
and verified on the blockchain. Repositories are pluggable
data stores that can be disconnected, relocated and recon-
nected. Repository owners can override permissions locally.
2. Data Authenticity.
Requirement: Participants should be able to exploit their
data, validate its authenticity, and share it confidently, even if
the institution that hosted the activity or the platform where
the data was generated is no longer available.
Proposed Approach: Raw data is not stored on the
blockchain, only instructions to retrieve and validate records.
Anyone holding raw data can validate it independently.
3. Data Integration and Aggregation.
Requirement: Data from multiple sources — hosted both
within and outside of traditional LEs — should be supported.
Proposed Approach: Records are stored in a way that
allows aggregation across repositories. Authorized third par-
ties can integrate records reliably. Coordination is abstracted
through an application programming interface (API).
IV. ARCHITECTURE
In this section, we outline the principal processes and
components of our blueprint, as well as its overall layout.
A. Overview
Capturing. Central to this architecture is the concept of
alearning activity that a learner performs within a digital
LE by interacting with other users, resources, and services.
For learners to take part in a learning activity, they need to
enroll. A single enrollment can be valid for multiple learn-
ing activities, comparable to taking a course. The learning
activities we consider for our design are scoped in time
and generate learning traces, each of which describes an
interaction. We propose that at the end of a learning activity,
the set of all learning traces for a given learner constitute a
learning block (LB). A learning block is self-describing, as
it contains metadata about the learning activity, such as the
LE, the learner, resources or services exploited, and other
users involved.
Recording. Figure 1 presents the process through which
a learning block gets recorded. Once the learning block has
been generated by the LE (Step 1), it is approved first by
the learner, who signs it and optionally sends it to other
participants (e.g. teachers, tutors, peers) as an encrypted
message (Step 2). This process can be automated and is anal-
ogous to submitting an assignment, with only the intended
recipients being able to view the content of the submission.
Other participants can then decrypt the submission, verify its
content, approve it with a signature, and resubmit until all
required parties have signed (Step 3). The hash of a signed
learning block is then recorded on the blockchain (Step 4)
so that it can later serve to verify that the data inside the
block has not been tampered with. The block itself is sent
to one or more learning block repositories (LBRs) (Step
5), which are databases adapted for the storage of learning
blocks. Depending on settings determined upon enrollment,
LBRs can be hosted by the LE provider, an institution, one
or more learners, and/or other third parties. The owner of
each repository manages the access permissions to the data.
Validating. To retrieve a learning block, the requesting
party requires access granted by the owner of the repository.
Access permissions are set upon enrollment, but can be
amended and even overridden at the repository level by the
owner. Hence, the repository owner can always disconnect
the repository from the network or change the access permis-
sions locally without requiring the consent of anyone else in
the network. If a request is legitimate and the repository is
online, a block is verified by comparing its hash to the one
recorded on the blockchain and returned if valid.
Hash of LB
Learning Block (LB)
Emitted by LE
Hash Stored on Blockchain
Learning Block
Repository
(LBR)
Learning
Traces
Learner
Generates
Traces Optionally Signed by
Multiple Other Parties
Signed by Learner
Learning Block Stored in LBR
Learning Environment
(LE)
. . .
Fig. 1. A learner’s interaction with a LE generates learning traces, which are then put together and emitted as a learning block at the end of the learning
activity. This block is then signed and sent to an external LBR, with its hash being recorded on the blockchain for future validation.
B. Components
Our proposed blueprint consists of a blockchain layer, an
application layer, and a communication layer, as depicted
in Figure 2. The blockchain layer comprises the smart
contracts that handle the main operations presented in this
proposal. The application layer includes components that are
completely separate from the blockchain functionality, such
as LEs, LBRs, and services performing LA. The communica-
tion layer includes all of the modules that handle interactions
between the blockchain and the rest of the system, including
the end user.
Blockchain Layer. The core of the system will be powered
by smart contracts, which are an automated way of executing
agreements that do not need a trusted third party [16]. We
will employ these as a way of managing the locations and ac-
cess permissions of learning traces, building on the approach
proposed by MedRec [6]. A principal enrollment contract
will manage the registration of participants’ public keys,
network addresses of learning block repositories and other
information necessary to sign, validate and fetch learning
blocks for a given learning activity or set thereof. It will
also emit events that other components will listen to in order
to relay relevant notifications to end users (e.g. validation,
change of address, permission changes). Secondary contracts
such as an access contract, an aggregation contract and a
transcript contract serve to respectively grant and revoke ac-
cess permissions, aggregate data across several participants,
and provide a single entry point for all the enrollments of an
individual participant, among other functionalities.
Application Layer. Components that handle data gener-
ation and storage outside of the blockchain are considered
to be application modules. These include the LE, the LBR,
and learning analytics services. The LE is where enrollment
occurs and where the learning activity takes place. It is
in charge of hosting the generation of learning traces and
grouping them at the end of the learning activity to constitute
alearning block. The LBR stores the signed learning blocks
and the learning analytics service processes data stored
across the repositories. It is important to note that only the
LBR contains data and that any LA service will fetch the
data required for analysis through the communication layer.
During this process, data is validated against the blockchain
layer. Nevertheless, our blueprint allows for a user with
access to the LBR to fetch data directly, without passing
through the communication layer or validating the authen-
ticity of the learning blocks. This enables clients that trust
the LBR—such as the user or institution that controls it—
to read directly from the repository without any additional
overhead.
Communication Layer. The communication layer con-
sists of agents that handle the transfer of data and requests
between the application modules, the blockchain, and the
user. The key idea is to expose an API that is abstracted
from a specific blockchain technology, allowing the system
to be modular. Agents also listen to events emitted by the
smart contracts and relay any relevant information to end
users or other components. A Writing Agent handles the
process depicted in Figure 1, namely signing a learning
block, registering its hash on the blockchain, sending the
learning block to the appropriate repository, and either no-
tifying participants that this transaction was successful or
reporting any failures. A Reading Agent handles ensuring
correct access permissions, fetching and validating a learning
block, and sending out success or failure notifications. A
third Registration Agent processes the initial registration of
information and any updates to access permissions, public
keys, and addresses.
C. Trust
An important aspect of this blueprint is that the whole
communication layer has to be trusted. This requirement
emerges due to the fact that it handles all interactions
with the blockchain, including the validation of learning
blocks and access permissions. A malicious communication
layer could fake validation and register spurious records on
the blockchain, or allow unauthorized access. Similarly, the
blockchain layer has to be trusted, either by using a public
blockchain that independently guarantees to be trustwor-
thy, or by relying on a permissioned blockchain controlled
by a trusted third-party. Since the contracts registered on
blockchains such as Ethereum1are immutable, deterministic,
open source programs that can be formally verified [17],
trust in those contracts can be independently audited. On
the other hand, the LBR and the LA services are not trusted,
and therefore all of their requests and responses are mediated
by the trusted communication layer.
1Ethereum (https://ethereum.org) is a blockchain application
platform that supports Turing-complete smart contracts.
Send LB
Confirm
Enrollment
Handle Aggregation for One Participant
Access
Contract
Aggregation
Contract
Notify of Changes
Request Permissions
Record Hash
Sign LB
Send LB
Confirm Recording of Hash
Transcript Contract
Request LB
Validate LB
Validate Access Permissions
Blockchain
Layer
Communication
Layer
Application
Layer
Send Registration
Send Updates
Send LB
Send LBR Network Address
Acknowledge Validity
Send Blockchain
Address of Hash
Request LB
Enroll
Update Information
Handle Aggregation Across Participants
Handle Access Changes
Request LB
Send LB
Writing Agent
Learning Environment
(LE)
Registration Agent Reading Agent
Learning Block Repository
(LBR)
LA Service
(LAS)
Enrollment
Contract
Fig. 2. Our blueprint consists of three layers. Abstracting interaction with the blockchain using a communication layer increases modularity and allows
integration with different chains. It also requires that the communication layer be trusted.
V. PRELIMINARY EVAL UATION
As highlighted in [18], teachers are often the ones deciding
what technology they adopt to support their practice. Thus, in
order to carry out a preliminary evaluation of the impact an
architecture based on our blueprint would have on teachers,
we conducted an online survey2of 25 teachers with expertise
in digital education solutions and previous experience with
built-in LA. The aim of this survey was to gauge the per-
ceived usefulness of features that emerge from the recording
and validating processes as described in Section IV-A.
Table I shows the results for four features divided into
two groups. Group 1 consists of features 1 and 2, which
are enabled by our blueprint, but not directly facilitated by
blockchain technology. Group 2 consists of features 3 and
4, which are directly supported in our blueprint through the
use of blockchain technology. A discussion of these results
follows in the next section.
TABLE I
TEAC HE RS WH O AGR EE T HAT A GI VE N FEATU RE S HO ULD B E SU PP ORTE D
BY A T EAC HER -OWN ED R EP OSI TO RY OF LE AR NI NG TR AC ES. (n= 25)
A repository of learning traces should: Agree
1. Be always accessible to the repository owner. 76%
2. Allow the repository owner to share data. 56%
3. Ensure data has not been tampered with. 56%
4. Verify data was generated by a given student. 36%
VI. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
The blueprint presented in this paper addresses the chal-
lenges highlighted in Section II, namely the need to main-
tain the privacy and security of learning records, assuring
their validity, and allowing integration with multiple LEs.
Additionally, it provides a solution for systems handling
student data to ensure that they are compliant with privacy
regulations, such as [11]. Our contribution is the scaffolding
for a novel application of the blockchain in education that
tackles the privacy requirements of participants, as well as
2Online Survey: https://bit.ly/2iDLbCZ
the need for transparency and accountability in the field
of LA. We focus on specifying the features required to
implement the design considerations outlined in Section III
and present a blueprint to create a prototype based on those
requirements. Our aim is to provide the foundations for
an architecture that allows users to store learning traces in
locations of their choice, without sacrificing the ability to
guarantee the authenticity of this data.
An architecture based on this blueprint would pave the
road for better privacy protection for those participating
in online learning activities. Instead of relying on vari-
ous third parties to continuously store and certify learning
achievements, it would allow learners to keep data in one
or more repositories that they control, with trust centered
around a communication layer that can validate data against a
highly-available blockchain. The capability of gathering and
integrating records from multiple sources could support per-
sonal development and reflective learning across platforms,
as proposed in [14] and [19]. Indeed, multiple e-portfolio
applications could be powered by these trusted repositories.
These e-portfolios would allow learners to confidently prove
attainment of competencies and both reflect on and showcase
their achievements, as motivated in [20]. Additionally, trusted
repositories of learning traces would grant researchers an
opportunity to perform analysis on distributed data with
a guarantee that it has not been tampered with, offering
more transparency and accountability when conducting LA.
Finally, by placing users in control of where the data is
located and who can access it, LEs can remove the need
to store activity traces themselves, thus addressing certain
requirements put forth by [11], such as the storage duration
and accessibility constraints described in Article 25.
On the other hand, there are also a number of limitations
and potential barriers to adoption that we need to consider
when implementing our blueprint. Firstly, placing user data
management in the hands of users themselves might result
in data being unavailable for LA. Applications dependent
on user data will be thus required to handle situations where
data is missing, providing graceful degradation of services, as
well as feedback about the completeness of datasets and the
validity of resulting LA. Secondly, given that the blockchain
is an immutable ledger, data written to it cannot be modified
or removed. Even if this data consists only of hashes of
activity traces or public keys, it is important to address any
possible ethical and legal requirements, as well as ensuring
that users are aware of what data can be erased and what
data is permanently on record. Thirdly, as publishing data to a
blockchain requires computing power (and possibly fees), we
need to ensure that the granularity and frequency of writes to
the blockchain are technically and financially viable. Finally,
given that blockchain infrastructures are vulnerable to a
number of malicious attacks [21], any architecture based
on blockchain technology needs to implement safeguards to
address these security implications.
Our preliminary evaluation sheds light on the perceived
usefulness of the features a blockchain-based architecture
could enable, as well as possible roadblocks it could en-
counter. While 76% of teachers surveyed found that being
always accessible was a key feature of a learning trace
repository, there were less favorable opinions regarding two
features that emerge from our blueprint through the use of a
blockchain, namely (a) ensuring data has not been tampered
with and (b) verifying data was generated by a given student.
These were respectively marked as important features only
by 56% and 36% of respondents. Although these results are
by no means conclusive, they could be indicative of teachers’
indifference to ensuring learning traces are authentic once a
learning activity is over. Nevertheless, our findings motivate
further evaluation of use cases for a system based on this
blueprint, possibly in providing a reliable data source for LA
researchers, who may perceive more added value in ensuring
the authenticity of data used in their studies.
VII. FUTURE WOR K
The proposed blueprint is a first step in the design of
our architecture and motivates our future work. A proof-
of-concept will be developed on the Ethereum blockchain
and validated on Graasp3. Once we have a proof-of-concept
within a single LE, we aim to perform a case study in an
educational context with multiple systems to integrate. With
this working prototype, we will test the potential to offer
cross-platform interoperability, which is one of the problems
identified in Section II. Moreover, in order to further assess
the potential use cases for a system based on this blueprint,
we aim to obtain additional feedback not only from teachers,
but also from students and LA researchers. Following this
approach, we expect to address the aforementioned potential
barriers to adoption, identify our target user base, refine our
design and consolidate our architecture in future work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research has been partially funded by the European
Union (grant agreement nos. 731685 and 669074).
3Graasp (https://graasp.eu) is an online platform used to create
learning spaces that generate traces of learner activity for LA usage.
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... What's more, this implementation cost, transaction cost of many techniques of blockchain technology is also very high (Farah et al., 2018). Without managing this development and operational cost, it will be difficult to use this blockchain technology in traditional education systems (Purdon and Erturk, 2017). ...
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With the advance of Internet technology, currently, there is no more centralized province for education in either the physical or virtual world, but education is now done through peer to peer interaction, online and from anywhere on earth. Therefore, Blockchain is getting significant considerations and is rapidly becoming part of the technology vernacular in the Iranian Educational system. This is mainly due to its unique features including decentralization, disintermediation, immutability, self-sovereignty, security, reliability, collaboration, data sharing, and data integrity. Despite this getting popularity and interest in this field, currently, stakeholders within education in Iran are largely unaware of the social advantages and potential of blockchain technology. That is why, through systematic literature review, the study centers on three primary subjects: It focuses on three main themes: (1) educational applications that have been developed with blockchain technology, (2) benefits that blockchain technology could bring to education, and (3) challenges of adopting blockchain technology in education. A detailed results analysis of each theme was conducted as well as an intensive discussion based on the findings. In the end, a detailed analysis of the results of each theme as well as a critical discussion was made based on the findings.
... On the other hand, Sahonero-Alvarez (2018) asserted that the fair use of BT in the market can serve as sustainable way of business performance with technical skills. Moreover, the literature suggests that learning BT is necessary for the students to improve their overall performance in the business environment (Farah et al., 2018), secure payments, and digital identity verification (Turkanović et al., 2018). Therefore, the following hypothesis is purposed. ...
... The findings of this hypothesis (H1) are aligned with the results of existing studies. According to Farah et al. (2018), blockchain information is important for the students to improve their overall behaviour and performance. Furthermore, the study Nokiti and Yusof (2019) discussed that BT is a useful tool for students as it helps them to understand the requirements of modern market and improve their strategies effectively to deal with the issues. ...
... Blockchain provides a decentralized and tamper-proof ledger that ensures the authenticity and immutability of eportfolio artifacts and reviews. It removes the need for intermediaries, reduces risks of data manipulation, and enhances the transparency and credibility of the review process [19]- [24]. Decentralized e-portfolio platforms empower learners to have complete ownership, control, and management over their e-portfolios [25]- [30]. ...
... In [23], they explored the use of blockchain for educational record reputation and reward systems, highlighting the advantages of distributed systems in enhancing trust and recognition. A blockchain-based architecture is presented in [24] for ensuring the integrity and trans-parency of learning trace repositories. An hybrid access control approach for enhanced security and privacy blockchain-based e-portfolio platform is proposed in [28]. ...
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E-portfolios have emerged as powerful tools in the education and professional development fields, enabling learners to showcase their skills, achievements, and credentials in a digital format. However, ensuring the security, authenticity and reliability of e-portfolio artifacts and credentials remains a challenge. Existing review systems face challenges such as lack of transparency, vulnerability to manipulation, and reliance on centralized trust. Therefore, this paper proposes B-TrustReview, a trustworthy and secure review system for decentralized e-portfolio platforms that leverages blockchain and smart contracts. By leveraging blockchain's decentralized and tamper-resistant nature, the system enhances the security, transparency, and reliability of reviews. Every review is securely recorded on the blockchain, creating an auditable and transparent record of evaluations. Smart contracts govern the execution of the review process, automating the validation and verification of reviews based on predefined criteria. This automation reduces reliance on intermediaries and minimizes the risk of biased or manipulated reviews fostering transparency, accountability, and credibility in evaluating e-portfolios. Moreover, it enables secure and efficient transactions, ensuring the confidentiality of user data and protecting against unauthorized access.
... Private or permissioned BC, or BC encryption, are two potential additional privacy safeguards that universities may need to employ. Since data of each public key is publicly exposed (Farah et al., 2018), users' transactions can be linked to reveal their information, making it impossible for BC to ensure transactional privacy. Likewise, all members' private keys should be safely stored and protected, which is another security problem that may and should be settled peacefully (Turkanovic et al., 2018). ...
... It's important to note that the expenses associated with adoption and implementation can be substantial. In addition to the high price of implementation, several BC solutions have prohibitively expensive transaction or computing costs (Farah et al., 2018). As was previously indicated, the expense of managing and storing such massive amounts of student data would increase as block size increases in tandem with the number of users (Han et al., 2018). ...
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The blockchain (BC) is the next technologically mediated socioeconomic megatrend in the age of technological revolution. In this chapter, the authors look at some of the obstacles that BC technology faces in the classroom. It is stated that the education sector cannot take for granted that the digital transformation. BC has many potential uses in education, including improving teacher and student agency, streamlining the rollout of educational projects, and establishing a transparent, decentralized system for accrediting and certifying students' proficiency. Educational BC with its distributed ledger offers innovative norms of crypto-learning and crypto-administration that are acceptable across companies and nations, strengthening thus the objectivity, authenticity, and control of information without being compromised by socioeconomic instabilities. BC technology's delayed acceptance in the education sector mirrors that in the teaching and learning sectors, but it also presents several major hurdles, including a lack of funding, security, cost, scalability, and awareness.
... Due to the high efficiency of blockchain, several applications could measure and evaluate the student's performance based on qualitative and quantitative parameters. For instance, Farah et al. (2018) built a system to trace the performance of students for their multiple learning activities. It adds up all traces for each given activity into a block. ...
Article
Blockchain technology has emerged as a transformative tool with the potential to revolutionize various sectors, including education. This research paper explores the applications of blockchain technology in the education sector, highlighting its rationale, challenges, and prospects. By leveraging blockchain's inherent properties of decentralization, immutability, and transparency, educational institutions can enhance data security, streamline administrative processes, and ensure the authenticity of academic credentials. The benefits of blockchain are multifaceted and might be beneficial to educational institutions and students. However, the adoption of blockchain technology is presently in its incipient stage within the educational sector.
... Allowing the wallet to also store badges from open or online courses and other training programs would allow people to seek more avenues of lifelong learning, collect various digital badges, and improve their skill profile. The majority of research papers in this subdomain propose methodologies and tools that can not only store and validate micro-accreditations but can also set learning paths and goals, thus motivating users to keep learning and earning badges [21][22][23][24][25]. ...
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Since its conceptualization in 2008, blockchain technology has advanced rapidly and been applied in multiple domains. In higher education, blockchain can be applied to develop ICT systems that can revolutionize student accreditation through certificate verification and micro-accreditations, which represent skills and other learning outcomes, in the form of digital/smart badges. While there are multiple studies that highlight the significance of blockchain in higher education and propose digital systems, few of those studies include the evaluation of such proposed systems by real users. As such, the research question of how useful a higher education blockchain system would be for its relevant stakeholders remains largely unanswered. In the research publication at hand, a blockchain-powered higher education platform was applied in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, where it was used and evaluated by students and professors at the school. The evaluation of the platform was positive, and participants found that the smart badge functionality was among the most useful. Finally, the execution and evaluation of the pilot led to several lessons learned and policy recommendations towards dealing with existing barriers and further promoting blockchain in higher education.
... Dengan asumsi bahwa hanya pihak-pihak terpercaya yang hanya terlibat, sehingga data yang disimpan di blockchain memang valid Farah, et al. [24]. Aplikasi blockchain digunakan untuk menyimpan riwayat aktivitas belajar siswa. ...
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Bitcoin merupakan mata uang digital atau yang lebih dikenal sebagai cryptocurrency. Bitcoin diciptakan pada tahun 2008 oleh Satoshi Nakamoto sebagai alat pembayaran elektronik secara peer-to-peer. Sebagai konsekuensinya, transaksi dengan menggunakan Bitcoin tidak memerlukan pihak ketiga seperti institusi keuangan atau pemerintah. Meskipun demikian, teknologi dibalik Bitcoin tidaklah baru. Pada dasarnya, Bitcoin menggunakan teknik-teknik dasar kriptografi dan jaringan komputer seperti fungsi hash, blockchain, jaringan komputer peer-to-peer, dan mekanisme konsensus. Sejak dibuatnya Bitcoin, aplikasi dari blockchain semakin meluas di berbagai bidang. Pada penelitian ini akan dibahas mengenai pengetahuan dasar mengenai blockchain. Selain itu, penelitian ini juga menganalisa implementasi blockchain, algoritma dasar yang digunakan, dan keterkaitannya dengan karakteristik blockchain di enam bidang berbeda yaitu ekonomi, kesehatan, pendidikan, pengarsipan dan kepemilikan, media, serta rantai pasok. Dari hasil analisis diketahui bahwa setiap bidang memiliki kebutuhan yang berbeda sehingga arsitektur blockchain yang dibangun juga berbeda.
... Second, considering the technical characteristics of blockchain, such as traceability, scalability, non-tamperability, decentralization, etc., it provides new ideas for the secure storage of evaluation data [59,60]. Examples include the Educhain blockchain platform for lifelong education records [61], a learning outcome record model for innovative entrepreneurship courses [62], and a tamper-resistant learning tracking repository [63]. ...
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This study aims to give a comprehensive overview of the application of the metaverse in educational evaluation. First, we characterize the metaverse and illustrate how it can support educational evaluation from the perspectives of virtual reality, augmented reality, and blockchain. Then, we outline the metaverse exploration framework and summarize its technical advantages. Based on this, we propose a metaverse-based implementation scheme to address the issues of reliability, accuracy, and credibility in educational evaluation. Finally, we show its implementation difficulties, performance evaluation, and future work. This proposed scheme opens up new research directions for the reform of educational evaluation while expanding the potential and reach of metaverse applications in education. We think that this study can help researchers in building an ecosystem for educational evaluation that is trustworthy, equitable, and legitimate.
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هدفت الدراسة إلى معرفة واقع توظيف تقنية Blockchain (البلوك تشين) في العمليَّة التعليميَّة بالجامعات السعوديَّة من خلال معرفة درجة استعداد الجامعات السعوديَّة لتوظيف إنترنت الأشياء في العمليَّة التعليميَّة، وأهمية ومعوقات توظيفه من وجهة نظر أعضاء هيئة التدريس بالجامعات السعوديَّة. ولتحقيق أهداف الدراسة استخدمت الباحثة المنهج الوصفي التحليلي، من خلال تطبيق استبانة طُبِّقت على عينة مكونة من (382) عضوًا من أعضاء هيئة التدريس بخمس جامعات سعودية تُمثل مناطق المملكة العربية السعوديَّة، وأظهرت الدراسة عددًا من النتائج كان أهمها: أن درجة استعداد الجامعات السعوديَّة لتوظيف البلوك تشين في العمليَّة التعليميَّة جاءت متوسطة حيث جاء المتوسِّط العام مساويًا (3.13) ودرجة موافقة (متوسطة) وجاءت أهمية توظيف البلوك تشين في العمليَّة التعليميَّة بالجامعات السعوديَّة من وجهة نظر أعضاء هيئة التدريس بدرجة عالية؛ حيث جاء المتوسِّط العام مساويًا (4.07) وبنسبة (62.61%)ودرجة موافقة (عالية)، كما وافق أفراد عينة الدراسة على أن هناك معوقات تحول دون توظيف البلوك تشين في العمليَّة التعليميَّة بالجامعات السعوديَّة؛ حيث جاء المتوسِّط العام مساويًا (4.03) وبنسبة (81.4%) وبنسبة (80.6%)ودرجة موافقة (عالية)، وفي ضوء نتائج الدراسة، أوصَت الدراسة بعددٍ من التوصيات، أهمها: العمل على الحدّ من المعوقات التي تحول دون توظيف البلوك تسين في العمليَّة التعليميَّة.
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The ‘blockchain’ is the core mechanism for the Bitcoin digital payment system. It embraces a set of inter-related technologies: the blockchain itself as a distributed record of digital events, the distributed consensus method to agree whether a new block is legitimate, automated smart contracts, and the data structure associated with each block. We propose a permanent distributed record of intellectual effort and associated reputational reward, based on the blockchain that instantiates and democratises educational reputation beyond the academic community. We are undertaking initial trials of a private blockchain or storing educational records, drawing also on our previous research into reputation management for educational systems.
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The collection and management of learning traces, metadata about actions that students perform while they learn, is a core topic in the domain of Learning Analytics. In this paper, we present a simple architecture for collecting and managing learning traces.We describe requirements, different components of the architecture, and our experiences with the successful deployment of the architecture in two different case studies: a blended learning university course and an enquiry based learning secondary school course. The architecture relies on trackers, collecting agents that fetch data from external services, for flexibility and configurability. In addition, we discuss how our architecture meets the requirements of different learning environments, critical reflections and remarks on future work.
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