One of the many industries that are enriched and empowered by blockchain is online learning. Today, and especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, blockchain technology is a big part of the online training sector. The technology is used to protect and safeguard this trending educational model, improve the quality of the process, and offer more opportunities for learning.
If online learning is a more accessible, affordable student contract for grades and certifications, blockchain is one of the moving forces of online learning. Still, this doesn’t mean that a student who studies online has it easy. On the opposite, students today need to write amazing argumentative essays to get good teacher comments for students’ writing. Thankfully, they can get some inspiration from reading Gradesfixer on free-to-use sites. Free examples of a research paper or an essay are the spell for good grades for all students, including those who study online.
While students worry about their assignments and online classes, it is the job of people in the blockchain sector to create a system that records information in a way that it can’t be hacked or changed without permission. Blockchain technology is a transaction model that’s distributed across a network of computer systems on the same blockchain.
In this article, we’ll learn how it’s used in online education and what influence it has on it.
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How Blockchain is Used in Online Education
Just a few years back, blockchain became one of the biggest buzzwords in the world. This was mostly due to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and similar high-value cryptocurrencies that investors fought to get their hands on. But, in addition to the great prospects of owning the right cryptocurrency, blockchain technology has many other things to offer.
Blockchain is used to facilitate the most secure online transactions. The transactions are passed through a digital ledger that records the transactions and makes them available to the right people. Here is how this benefits online education:
Digital Badges and Credentials
The first thing that comes to mind when you connect blockchain with online learning is digital badges. Many popular online learning platforms like Google, Kaplan University and Rosetta Stone have partnered with Accredible for their certification programs. This blockchain technology offers paperless credential verification that’s integrated with a variety of digital systems and tools. In other words, the companies use blockchain to create secure certificates and digital badges that can be verified right away as well as displayed on digital platforms.
Data Storing and Tracking
Blockchain technology works by storing information in blocks that are linked together. If you save data in a blockchain once, it cannot be rewritten or changed, but you can change the stored block. This is an approach that’s non-destructive, and perfect for tracking data changes over longer periods of time.
Decentralized Online Learning
Blockchain has opened up a path for decentralized education online. Platforms that use this opportunity are not maintained by a central authority. Instead, they are maintained by consensus where blockchain makes the peer-to-peer online learning very possible. Basically, this allows for platforms that have no single educator as an exclusive owner.
The Challenges in Online Education and Blockchain
The education sector and blockchain make for a very powerful combination. This boosts the use of smart technology and improves the quality of education offered online. However, while it’s beneficial in many ways, it also comes with its hurdles and challenges.
There are still many issues to overcome seeing how blockchain is still new on the market and advances at an incredibly fast pace. In online courses, the biggest challenges are user retention and completion rates. Many people will sign up for a course, but most will give up on them or fail to complete them for some reason.
A Gartner survey showed that almost 50% of education respondents lack interest in using blockchain technology. Here are the main challenges that come with this:
Scalability
Online education gives students access to a huge amount of data and learning opportunities, but this creates scalability issues with blockchain. As the amount of data grows, so does the number of blocks that retain it. As the number grows, the speed of transactions can slow down, especially since every transaction requires peer-to-peer verification.
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Security
As you can imagine, people are highly concerned about security when using new systems for transactions. In the blockchain, there are blocks that store sensitive information and institutions have to think hard about what they store, where and why.
Educational institutions, including those that operate online need fierce data security. This can be enhanced by encrypting data on the blockchain and by permission blockchain. As the technology develops, educational systems must adapt to its demands and way of work to improve their security.
Validity and Rates of Adoption
Blockchain-based certifications are available on some of the most popular eLearning platforms but even so, this is not yet a popular system. Many students who obtain this kind of credential face trouble with it afterward. These credentials don’t work everywhere – some companies and schools don’t accept their validity.
Cost
The technology is slowly being adopted in online learning, but it is not cheap. We are talking about great computing power, big changes to existing infrastructure, etc. Many educational institutions lack the funds to manage data on blockchain platforms.
Wrapping Up
Blockchain technology is a big hype in the world today, and it’s becoming more involved in online learning than ever. Thanks to it, students can easily manage their credentials and educational institutions can control these credentials. It’s a way to safely store and process information and track changes over time.
Still, this great innovation is still new to the online learning world. To use its full potential, we need to overcome a set of challenges. Hopefully, this will happen fast, and it will improve online education as we know it soon.