IT Trends
Blockchain’s Potential for Education
While the technology is still in the nascent stages, blockchain-based education systems have the potential to revolutionize how school districts manage student data.
At the fundamental
level, blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology that
allows parties to share information with each other through a
controlled system that manages transactions. In the education space,
the technology has the potential to revolutionize how school
districts share and maintain data, but the technology hasn’t
trickled down to the K-12 environment yet.
See also: Blockchain Deployment Checklist
Universities started
exploring this space over the last few years in academic
credentialing. Transcripts, grades, test scores and digital diplomas
could be stored in a student’s digital wallet, where the student
has control over how the information could be shared. Blockcerts,
developed by MIT’s
Integrated Learning Initiative and Learning
Machine, is one initiative that is helping
universities and students take ownership of their data when it comes
to digital diplomas. Southern
New Hampshire University and Central
New Mexico Community College have also taken steps to
offer digital diplomas to their graduates.
“Blockcerts is a
global open standard for anchoring any type of document to any
blockchain as secure anchor of trust,” said Natalie Smolenski,
senior vice president of business development at Learning Machine.
“The blockchain basically serves as a kind of global notary for
these academic records, so that even if the issuing institutions
can't be contacted anymore or the software vendor that was used to
issue that record goes out of business or doesn't support that
product anymore, recipients still have their documents and they can
verify them for life.”
Blockchain in K–12
While some school
districts have reached out to Learning Machine to understand how
Blockcerts works, there are no current K-12 school systems using the
open standard technology in the United States.
IBM, which is working similarly at the collegiate
level, could not provide any examples of how blockchain is currently
being used by school districts.
However, this is not
keeping technologists and school executives from painting a picture
of where blockchain technology could develop in the K-12 space. In a
high-level analysis, KnowledgeWorks
released a forecast of where the technology could go over the next 10
years. The 2016 report identifies four possible use cases: a unified
blockchain platform to make administrative tasks more manageable, a
turnkey solution that decentralizes ideas and modules around the
technology for ease of use, an open-source network management tool
for parents to share learning experiences and a blockchain-based
ecosystem management tool to store, analyze and manage
learning-related data.
Potential Use
Cases in Action
Tom Ryan, chief
information and strategy officer for Santa
Fe Public Schools, has been exploring the benefits of
blockchain technology to secure student data and improve the
acquisition process. One of the challenges that school district CIOs
face is how to protect student data and privacy. School districts
face many of the same challenges when it comes to protecting student,
teacher and staff personally identifiable information, which can
cause major problems when a district or third-party contractor is
hacked.
“Privacy issues
become a big concern when you are trying to protect student data on
performance, so you can create predictive analytics for your school
district to provide better resources,” Ryan said. “There is a
balance that needs to be created for information that can help us to
do a better job teaching.”
Ryan is exploring
how blockchain could be used to secure and protect student data as a
distributed ledger that provides a trusted environment. Using a
permissioned blockchain, data can be stored on the chain that is
secure and controlled when it comes to third parties.
Another application
for blockchain comes from the Board
of Cooperative Educational Services used by schools in
New York and Regional Education Collaboratives used across the United
States. The BOCES and RECs programs allow school districts to
leverage their buying power by banding together in order to acquire
technology support and other services. Ryan said a blockchain-based
system could provide a trusted environment for different school
districts to communicate and share services.
“For instance, a
substitute working in five different school districts could use a
BOCES-based blockchain to get paid, and there would be a trusted
relationship between the BOCES and each one of their financial
systems to make a transaction much easier,” Ryan said. “The
blockchain environment would provide a trusted place to make a
transaction, which would be automated by the blockchain environment
with the individually independent systems in each school.”
Ryan’s interest in
blockchain came out a contract that Santa Fe Public Schools has with
a company called SchoolStream
that does automation workflow through a blockchain platform. “We
are looking to automate the process of onboarding an employee and all
of the forms that need to go on the blockchain,” Ryan said. “We
are working with this company to automate this workflow which has a
payback on a more efficient way to do this process.”
Another potential
application for blockchain comes from the
San Jose State University Research Foundation which
received a federal
$100,000 grant from the Institute
of Museum and Library Services in 2017. The
foundation hosted a
national forum in August 2018 to bring together
libraries to discuss how library leaders can develop a distributed
metadata system, facilitate better digital rights management and
create a protocol for community-based collections.
When it comes to the
private sector, IBM is working with companies like Walmart
and Maersk
to improve supply chain activities, but Alex Kaplan, global leader of
strategic deals for IBM Watson Education, said the use cases for the
K-12 education market are not fully apparent.
“In the education
space, we want to figure out the actual applications of this robust
technology to apply it to the education space,” Kaplan said. “We
are in the exploration phase and maturation of the technology will be
addressed in the next few years and support learners and education.”
For students
applying to college, it is possible that academic credentials from
schools could be automatically sent to participating universities.
However, Kaplan said, it is currently unclear how students can
provide information to show their “personalized learning pathways,”
which include badges, extracurriculars and other forms of learning
that occur outside the classroom. In order to include all of this
information in a digital wallet, the quantity and quality of the data
needs to be secured in a secured format.
There has never been
a place where we could collect the full set of information around an
individual has been an impediment to building personalized learning
pathways,” said Kaplan. “With blockchain, we are going to have a
much higher set of quality data which means that we will get better
outcomes from using artificial intelligence. Blockchain is part of a
quilt of solutions to make things work.”