Blockchain: Opportunities and Challenges in the Educational Context

Abstract

A blockchain is a new technology that provides a distributed appendonly ledger, which basically it means that it is almost unfeasible to modify or delete data once recorded. Furthermore, blockchains are maintained and governed by multiple nodes, which decide the state of the system following a consensus protocol. In this way, blockchains not only avoid single points of failure, but also create transparent systems that cannot be tampered or manipulated by a reduced group of entities with admin rights (unlike centralized systems). Attracted by these benefits, in the recent years many projects from many different sectors are proposing to use a blockchain to improve existing services or to deploy new business cases that require the consensus, the involvement and/or the cooperation of several actors. This chapter explores prominent proposals related to education and academia. In this context, trends are moving towards: financial applications, administrative efficiency, certification, immutable public registry, reputation systems, and identity systems and privacy. Moreover, this chapter also takes into account the problems associated with blockchains and discusses the main difficulties and challenges that proposals embracing this technology will have to address.