By Saikiran Sondarkar, EA to Chairman, Special Initiatives, ITM Group of Institutions

 

As Blockchain is termed as the greatest inventions in 21th Century, it is truly changing the way we store data in public ledger, through DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology), an anonymous person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto, termed this technology as Blockchain in 2008 in a white paper for Cryptocurrency, BitCoin.

 

Cryptocurrencies are valued at a huge price because of the low risk of failing infrastructure and extremely smart limited supply of BitCoin in the system as compared to normal Fait currency.

 

Our interest in this article lies in the underlying technology Blockchain, an autonomous Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), which stores our data in form of records, and provides us with verifiable, tamper-proof, unchangeable and Immutable way to store records.

 

As every industry sector is in a race to implement their problem solutions using this greatest invention of the 21st century, let’s see how the most stable industry of the world in decades “Education Sector” is trying to adapt and how this technology can change Education Industry.

 

Blockchain Technology Applications in Education

 

Permanent and Verifiable Academic credentials 

 

From class 1 to PG, every academic credit is handed over to student on a piece of paper, which can’t be verified easily through the traditional methods, to replace this many start-ups and technology companies are trying to develop Blockchain-based system which can store all the credentials in an immutable way which can be easily verified

 

Providing Skills Tags 

 

Currently when a student acquires a new skill they are not able to showcase the skills online transparently to employers, and this can be changed using Blockchain-based person profile which lists all the skills one has and from they acquired, just to imagine it is like digital badges for a student over Blockchain, and this will change the way skills are reflected to employer for a student in a verified and permanent manner.

 

Permanent digital record storing 

 

As universities/ Colleges keep all the student records in a proprietary format, which are accessed by the institutions over a period of time, let us say the records are saved in some database, thinking of Blockchain in this perspective can help us save the record for a lifetime.

IP for Content 

 

In traditional way teachers publish their research paper often to showcase the world about their latest discovery and after publishing the research the teacher is not rewarded in many cases when his/her research results is being used, but using Blockchain there can be a very easy way to openly publish the research over the public network with access to the research to people only when researcher wants and even using this method, the researcher can be easily get awarded for his work, when someone is using it.

 

Transfer of student’s credits 

 

As we can store the academic credits of students in a DTL system, there is also the possibility for students to transfer their credits from previous institute to the new institute if they wish to change and obtaining a seat with, so refraining the student to undergo again the subjects which he obtained in previous institute.

 

As discussed the above examples of how Blockchain is going to change the way education institutes are operating, and these are only a few examples, in fact, Blockchain is going to change the way every data is stored which can’t be altered lifetime

 

And this potential in Blockchain when formulated properly with traditional university/ Colleges can change the way how world is seeing towards the academics, majorly transforming academic credit system.