Blockchain in HE: Adapt and Adopt, or Perish (1)
Blockchain’s potential for social and economic disruption is rooted in its distributed ledger capability. The ledger is a foundational technology of capitalism because it records ownership and transfers of capital.
In technological terms, blockchain is positively disruptive: decentralized databases solve the problems of centralized data storage. Centralized databases are a security hazard: single individuals can control access to the data of millions of people, hackers can concentrate their efforts on a single point of access, power and hardware failure jeopardizes continuity, and redundancy systems are costly and require nearly as much management as primary systems.
The notion of printed certificates proving credentials persists. Certificates are perceived to be signifiers of social capital and intellectual achievement, despite ambiguity regarding the ownership and value – is the credential the property of the institution or the awardee, what exactly is it worth and to whom?
An individual may possess a certificate, but it remains difficult to ascertain whether or not that individual performed the work necessary to obtain it. Notarisation confirms ownership only. When certificates are notarised on the blockchain, a private and public encryption key are activated. At that moment, a significant sociological transformation occurs: power moves from the institution to the individual. The institution is no longer required to validate a certificate. Validation is assured by blockchain’s inbuilt hashing mechanism: an adjusted certificate will produce a different hash that will conflict with the hash generated by the institution when the authentic document was processed by a hashing application. Questions about social values, transparency and provenance, and trust will diminish, since credential fraud will become difficult to the point of near impossibility.
The traditionally structured, tutor-focused learning format will be replaced by near infinite “plug-and-play” options. Learners will slot together an education of their own design. Blockchain will be indispensable in the achievement of this, since blockchain will provide a reliable record of learning history.
The blockchain security model can be interpreted as comprising three layers. These are described in the following table.
Three Layers of a Blockchain Certificate (An Interpretation)
The current applications of blockchain in education fall into four categories:
Issue and recognition of credentials
Blockchain enables notarisation of certificates, non-deletable and incorruptible storage of data, accessibility of digital documents and supporting details, and digitization of paper documents. Blockchain enables “connected learning” too: digital certificates can contain clickable URLs that link the blockchain to a website, where, for example, a certificate is declared valid and other relevant details displayed.
Management of intellectual property
Research records can be secured by blockchain, allowing fair usage of educational resources. Teaching material downloads can be tracked and charges levied accordingly. Research impact can be quantified via an impact factor index. This would indicate quality – citation count reflects the consensus regarding the quality of a piece of research.
Payment and smart contracts
Tuition fees could be payable through smart contracts. Voucher funding can be enabled too, preventing misuse of funds. Existing problems with funding and fees can be addressed, i.e. academic overpromising and the exaggerated claims of university marketing departments: smart contracts could enforce accountability by enabling conditional payments. Such bidirectional transparency has strong implications for the learner-provider power dynamic.
Self-sovereignty and identity management
Learner identity is secured by hashes held on the blockchain. The learner’s identity is embedded and hashed in the document’s “machine layer”. This prevents illicit transfer or appropriation of documents, even between parties of the same name (because institutions will use student-identifying numbers). When coupled with biometric identification technologies, blockchain security is further reinforced.
To be positively implemented in education, blockchain technology requires governance via common technical protocols and standards. To capture blockchain’s economic and functional advantages, HE must undergo significant infrastructural reconfiguration.