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Blockchain can verify information, reduce fraud, help create next-generation educational institutions

Today's education system faces more challenges and problems than ever before, especially in the United States. Soaring college tuition fees, increased administrative costs, and other issues only underscore the need for change in the education industry.

• While blockchain technology cannot solve these problems, it can help create new solutions that can help move our education system in the right direction. Specifically, blockchain technology can:

• Reduce management costs

• Reduce grade, degree and science falsification

• Prevent and/or reduce plagiarism

• Allows for the creation of decentralized educational institutions

"Gamifying" the educational process to motivate good behavior

While blockchain technology can improve various stages of the academic process, in this article we will focus on applications of blockchain specifically for higher education.

Blockchain can reduce educational administration costs

With many US public universities charging close to $100,000 for a four-year degree and many private schools charging more than $200,000 for a four-year degree, almost everyone agrees that education is too expensive, at least in the US.

Many people chalk this up to the concept of "bureaucracy and construction", which means hiring additional staff who don't teach or do research, and irresponsible spending related to campus infrastructure, such as high tech which may be rare Lecture halls are used, or unnecessary sports or recreational facilities.

Blockchain technology cannot stop irresponsible administrators from creating bloated budgets or constructing new buildings. However, it can reduce the cost of various fees related to record keeping, accounting and certification, which can prevent unnecessary staff from being hired and even allow institutions to lay off staff, potentially allowing schools to lower tuition.

By creating an immutable record of administrative expenditures, blockchain technology could also create a more public record of how schools spend money, which can incentivize cost savings and prevent external factors such as fraud and embezzlement.

If some colleges take these steps and are able to effectively cut costs and increase transparency, it could create more competition among colleges, encouraging cost cutting to maintain student retention.

Blockchain certificates could help reduce rampant education fraud

While many work for years to earn a degree, others simply edit their resume and add one. This type of fraud is much more common than one might think. According to a survey by CareerBuilder, 75% of human resource managers find job applicants lying on their resumes. Unfortunately, one of the most common types of fraud is degree fraud, where applications lie about grades, degrees earned, schools attended, or all of the above.

Even if an individual is not committing outright fraud, they may have purchased a degree from a "diploma mill," a fraudulent business that issues degrees on behalf of closed or non-existent schools. This can have a similar effect to lying directly on a resume, as it creates a false impression in the mind of the hiring manager of the candidate's true qualifications.

While some may see this as a victimless crime, it negates the hard work of those who do earn their degrees and creates an uneven playing field. For some occupations, fake degrees can also lead to serious legal or medical consequences. For example, a fake English degree can be a serious problem, but a fake nursing or medical degree can lead to the death or serious illness of a patient.

Fortunately, blockchain technology can do a lot to reduce this type of fraud. As in other fields of education, decentralized ledgers are created to keep an immutable record of every student in an institution, their grades, and any diplomas they earn. Blockchain oracles are third-party applications that interact with the blockchain to help with inquiries from hiring managers or others who wish to access information.

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"Unfortunately, fraud happens not only outside of educational institutions, but also within educational institutions. In many cases, university professors have been caught forging their credentials...Fortunately, blockchain technology can do a lot to reduce This type of fraud."

Groups of educational institutions, such as those approved by a regional or national accrediting agency (e.g., the Southern Association of Schools and Schools in the southeastern United States), could pool student information into a shared blockchain database, providing potential employers, academic institutions, and even members of the public, to verify whether an individual has earned a particular credential at a particular time.

Blockchain can also help reduce plagiarism

Even with the advent of common plagiarism checkers like Grammarly and Turnitin, plagiarism remains a major problem in academic institutions of all kinds. While direct plagiarism can be eradicated from online sources using traditional tools, it is much more difficult to eradicate plagiarism among students — and this is where blockchain comes in. By creating a decentralized ledger of all student work at a given institution, academic papers can be easily compared with those of fellow students.

This will allow teachers to compare not only a paper written today with those of classmates in that particular class, but with all academic papers written in that school since the ledger began. It can also compare a particular job to that of other students taking similar courses at nearby institutions or even across the country if the shared blockchain ledger is to be used by multiple institutions.

Since entries on a blockchain ledger are time-stamped, the ledger can also be used to prove who actually wrote something first, in case there is a dispute.

However, like the issue of falsified degrees, plagiarism is not something only students do. Professors, graduate researchers, and others also plagiarize. This kind of plagiarism can be even more insidious because it often occurs when scholars submit articles or research to scientific or scholarly publications.

Especially when dealing with serious subjects, such as medical research, plagiarism of research or results can lead scientists or doctors to draw wrong research conclusions. This can seriously affect the quality of ongoing research and can even lead to loss of life due to medical breakthroughs not achieved due to plagiarized work.

An academic paper proposes the use of public-key cryptography, using the commonly used SHA-256 hash function and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for signatures. If a paper is plagiarized, it will be rejected by the ledger and an immutable record will be created for the individual or group that submitted it. The system will also make it impossible for users to change papers later in an attempt to hide their plagiarism.

Blockchain could allow decentralized academic institutions to thrive

While the traditional college and university model may continue to exist, more and more of our education system has come online.

Major colleges and universities now offer many online degrees, and even those that don't offer official degrees often offer certificates or free courses online. In addition, independent online course providers such as Udemy or Coursera offer low-cost courses in thousands of subjects, from computer science and engineering to art, design and music.

Unfortunately for students, online non-degree programs and programs do not yet have the prestige of earning a degree from a traditional academic institution. In many cases, purely online learners without a degree may be better informed and even better prepared for discipline-specific careers. However, they are far less likely to be hired than less qualified candidates with degrees, or even unrelated candidates.

Because the cost of higher education is so high, many people decide to forego it altogether, even though it often puts them at a disadvantage. What might be needed, and what blockchain could make possible, is a whole new kind of academic institution—without the high costs and administrative bloat. Specifically, academic institutions formed as DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) could virtually eliminate the need for administrators, as they would exist as a series of smart contracts between students and faculty.

If enough professors from well-known, prestigious institutions form a DAO, it can, in time, generate the reputation needed to help graduates get jobs on par with or even surpass graduates of traditional academic institutions. In the Middle Ages, a university was just a contract between a student and a professor - although much has changed since that era, it would be nice to reintroduce this concept into our modern model of executive education.

Decentralized educational institutions, DAO or not, can issue coins or tokens that the public may buy to invest in the success of the institution. This would create a new education funding model that could seriously disrupt the current system.

Blockchain can help encourage high performance by 'gamifying' the educational process

Throughout the long history of education, students have almost always paid teachers (or the institutions they work for) for the right to attend classes and be educated. However, what if this model was reversed? Some people think it should be -- students should actually be paid to learn. It may sound unrealistic, but some believe that "gamifying" the educational process can lead to better outcomes for students and teachers.

For example, students can earn small amounts of cryptocurrency for turning in assignments on time, taking challenging classes or degrees, or even mentoring other students. All of these activities can be verified through smart contracts attached to student wallets. While these payments may not be particularly large, even small payments can help motivate students to engage in more productive behavior, which can save institutions, educators, and students a lot of time and money. These funds may come from tuition already paid by the student as part of an education reimbursement program.

Of course, this system can also be gamified on the teacher’s end – through cryptocurrency rewards for creating or presenting lectures, mentoring students, or grading essays or other assignments on time.

Blockchain could also revolutionize the student loan process

American students currently have more than $1 trillion in student loan debt, and many are struggling to pay it off. Student loan offers are fraught with complicated agreements, unclear terms and rates, and often rife with fraud. However, blockchain technology is poised to solve some problems through new economic arrangements.

Fortunately, companies are already working hard to realize this vision. Open Esquire is a company working with OpenLaw, a company that helps design legal contracts for the ethereum blockchain, to create tokenized revenue-sharing agreements for educational financing. The Open Esquire platform signs investment agreements based on the amount of financing students want, the degree they hope to achieve, and the income they are likely to earn after graduation. Currently, these ISAs are being distributed through a company called Polybird, which operates an exchange called Polybird to allow investors and students to participate in these revenue-sharing agreements. Ideally, these arrangements could significantly impact loan default rates and could one day even make traditional student loans obsolete.

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“U.S. students currently have over $1 trillion in student loan debt, and many are struggling to pay it off...However, blockchain technology promises to solve some of these problems through new economic arrangements.”

However, blockchain technology is not limited to generating new forms of education financing; it can also help those issuing and receiving traditional student loans.

In many cases, student loans are offered to prospective college students under false pretenses. In other cases, the loans are sent directly to the school without actually being used to finance the student's education. Sometimes schools illegally sign on to student loans without the student's knowledge. In addition to these issues, student loan identity theft is a major problem, with identity thieves stealing millions of dollars in fraudulent student loans each year.

Blockchain systems can help address these issues through better security and better user verification processes. Specifically, a blockchain database could be used to ensure that potential student borrowers receive the correct information before signing a loan agreement, and an assigned key can be used to verify their identity before signing. In addition to holding encryption keys, students may also need to utilize biometric information to confirm their identity, which could make it more difficult for fraudsters to forge a student's identity.

This type of system can also be used to allow students to verify each additional payment and how it is spent to ensure no fraudulent transactions occur on behalf of the student, the school, or the lender itself. For federal student loans, the blockchain ledger could also be used to verify graduates' current income for income-based student loan repayment planning.

Additionally, student loan lenders and servicers, taking cues from the healthcare industry, could help prevent identity theft by creating a shared ledger of student loan applications and payments. For example, if a first-year student is getting an undergraduate business degree on loan from a school in New York, and an application pops up with their name on a medical school loan in California (from a different lender on the shared blockchain), the classification Accounts can raise "red flags" and halt suspicious applications until the problem is resolved.

Examples of Blockchain Education Startups Helping Transform Education

• While we've discussed the many potential applications of blockchain technology in education, here are a few companies that are actually trying to implement the technology in the real world:

• Blockcerts: Developed at MIT in Cambridge, MA, Blockcerts is an open platform that allows for the creation of blockchain-based educational credentials, including transcripts, degrees, and diplomas. In 2018, more than 600 MIT graduates chose to receive the digital version of the Blockcerts Blockchain Diploma.

• Disciplina: Disciplina Based in Tallinn, Estonia, Disciplina utilizes blockchain technology to create a single ledger of each student's academic performance across classes and subjects. Students are assigned marks by a decentralized algorithm that can be used to create specialized study plans based on students' individual needs.

• Edgecoin: Edgecoin is an "educational stablecoin" that allows students to pay schools for tuition, registration fees, books, housing, and other items through a high-speed, decentralized application.

Tutellus: Tutellus is an educational company that is expanding blockchain education programs for the Spanish-speaking world. Students get paid for learning and educators get paid for teaching by using their native TUT token.

The Importance of Oracles to Blockchain Education

Blockchains are generally closed systems, which is why they require third-party applications to access "real world" information. These third-party applications, known as oracles, are essential in almost every type of blockchain application, including those created for the education industry. As we mentioned earlier in the article, one important use of oracles is to handle off-chain data requests from potential employers or other academic institutions for student or alumni information, such as grades, diplomas, certificates, and other essential data.

Some of the education models we mentioned will use tokens or cash to help students pay for education, or directly pay students or teachers to participate in educational activities. In these cases, oracles are also needed to confirm tokens and token prices, especially when those tokens are exchanged or traded on major exchanges.

SupraOracles are positioned to provide secure, accurate and fast pricing data for the blockchain education revolution

While oracles are essential to blockchain applications in every industry, including education, there are still significant issues with oracle technology. The need to trust third-party software providers often eliminates the benefits offered by blockchain; this is known as the "oracle problem".

With its strong decentralized architecture of clans and tribes, cutting-edge cryptography, efficient consensus process, and fast finality, SupraOracles are positioned to empower next-generation blockchain applications—including those focused on education.

Related Reading

• Simon, Caroline (2017, Sept.) Bureaucrats And Buildings: The Case For Why College Is So Expensive.

• (2017, Sept. ) 75% of HR Managers Have Caught a Lie on a Resume, According to a New CareerBuilder Survey.

• (2015) Your Organization’s Reputation on the Line: The Real Cost of Academic Fraud. National Student Clearinghouse.

• (Andi, A., Purba, R., Yunis, R.) (2019, Oct.) Application of Blockchain Technology to Prevent The Potential Of Plagiarism in Scientific Publication.

• What is a decentralized autonomous organization, and how does a DAO work?.