Implementation of blockchain-based document management system for higher education organizations

This technology streamlines the issuing and managing of educational credentials. Digital certificates and badges can be securely issued and shared with learners, employers, or other institutions, reducing administrative burdens and ensuring efficient verification of student credentials.

It provides a decentralized and secure ledger where educational records, like diplomas, certificates, and transcripts, can be stored. Records are secured once recorded on the chain, ensuring their integrity and preventing fraud or unauthorized modifications.

This emerging technology enables transparent verification of educational credentials. Any network participant can verify a record’s originality without relying on a centralized authority. This grows trust and eliminates the need for time-consuming manual verification processes.

It employs advanced cryptographic techniques to secure data. Personal information and educational records stored on the chain are encrypted, ensuring privacy and protection against unauthorized access. Users can control their data and grant selective access to relevant parties.

A digital agreement document deployed on the blockchain. Contracts are executed when certain conditions are satisfied. It simplifies automated enrollment, fee payments, course completion validation and transfer of credits, reducing manual intervention and enhancing efficiency.

It promotes the portability and interoperability of educational credentials across institutions and platforms. Students can maintain a digital record of their achievements, quickly shared and verified by different educational stakeholders, and eliminate repetitive documentation.

A study [16] presents a literature review on block-chain technology’s use in education. Another study [17] discusses the pros and cons of technology in education. The main applications that lie in education are decentralization and digitization of processes. Their research delves into several important issues, including scalability issues brought on by slow-moving blockchain transactions, the Scaling Trilemma, and data protection laws that hinder application developers. Additionally, they emphasized the difficulties associated with market adoption.

Three critical findings are worth mentioning based on searching and screening reference papers. First, chatbots are the most common Artificial Intelligence (AI) learning technology, which provides personalized, scalable, and cost-effective learning. Second, with a focus on meta-teaching and meta-learning, robotics applications are typically exploratory. Third, real-time contracting, time-stamping of education, digital certification, digital credential verification, and digital grading are a few of the uses of blockchain. The rigorous process of verifying medical school diplomas, internship completion, and board certification is known as physician and practitioner credentials. Getting hospital privileges and a medical board license can be costly and time-consuming processes that frequently call for a high degree of blind faith in the doctor’s or other practitioner’s qualifications. The credential verification process gets more brutal as non-medical professionals broaden their areas of practice and loosen up telemedicine regulations. In medicine, ultrasound is a specialized procedure requiring practice to become proficient. In the past, operators with different backgrounds in the medical field use have shown a wide range of skill levels. Blockchain technology maintains a public ledger for tracking various ultrasound records. Moreover, it streamlines the credential verification procedure, increasing its effectiveness and requiring a higher standard of integrity from each provider [14].

Key Management Infrastructure (KMI) has pioneered blockchain for online reputation management, badges, and certificates. KMI has developed a block-chain prototype for micro-credential issuance and is using Ethereum to make badges into smart contracts. The main goals of KMI’s activities are to lead blockchain initiatives in higher education and develop blockchain technology for use in UK higher education qualifications. KMI is working on blockchain projects with the University of Texas and the University of Ghent. OU’s initiative, however, does not prioritize the end-user and is not offered to satisfy employers, other parties, or third parties. KMI concentrates on the layers of applications, and users can manage their data and private vital wallets, in theory.

To give recipients more control over the certificates they have earned, the MIT Media Lab employs Blockcerts to certify groups of students digitally. The recipients of this initiative might be independent of an outside party to store, validate, and verify credentials. The issuer digitally signs the certificate, and its hash is stored in the blockchain transaction using MIT’s certification architecture. Every recipient has a separate hash value for their certificate. This initiative had an ownership problem since MIT had to roll out certificates using a pair of graduation and workshop participation. Furthermore, a great degree of trust in this system is necessary. Since everyone can access data and certificates of their ownership, privacy is another crucial consideration. The issue is that although the certificate can be shared with one employer, the recipient cannot keep it a secret from another employer. Hashing is employed when an employer requires verification of the authenticity of a certificate and discloses the certificate and its hash value. The privacy issue must still be fully addressed [20–23].

Another blockchain-based method for confirming academic credentials is called “RecordsKeeper.” Educational institutions can use RecordsKeeper to issue certificates and give users a receipt which they can share with the employer to verify the certificate. The employer will use the receipt to verify the certificate in RecordsKeeper. This mechanism is simple, but ownership rights must be with the parties who want to view the certificate in the proposed blockchain. This is equivalent to giving ownership to a third party, which could result in manipulation. To guarantee the certificate’s security, this might function effectively on a private blockchain [24–26]. Table 2 discusses various International Universities using blockchain for record keeping.

Block sizes have increased due to educational systems gathering vast amounts of data on numerous students. Transactions on the blockchain take longer as there are more blocks and each transaction requires peer-to-peer verification [34]. The network’s technical scalability is thus a significant technological challenge of blockchain, particularly for public block-chains, which may prevent its widespread adoption, as is the case with the education sector [28]. Blockchains are slow compared to other systems. They typically have lengthy transaction times and little storage capacity [35], which could be a significant drawback in some educational environments. It is common knowledge that legacy networks can handle thousands of transactions per second. For example, Visa has a processing speed of about 1,667 transactions per second. However, the two most widely used blockchain networks, Ethereum and Bitcoin, are still far behind in transaction speeds. Ethereum can process about 20 transactions per second, compared to 3–4 transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain [36]. However, the kind of educational application created will determine how to handle the scalability issue of the speed of blockchain transactions [34].

Since privacy in the blockchain is difficult to achieve, it is a challenge in several academic usage scenarios that deal with sensitive data. The fact that transactions on the blockchain are visible to all users could jeopardize privacy because this information could be gathered and made public elsewhere [37]. In the present days, a lot of educational institutions follow stringent privacy laws. Students have faith in the people who handle their data. Nevertheless, these data will lose their privacy if stored in a public ledger. In this case, public blockchains are ineffective for storing these data, even when they are encrypted [35]; therefore, a private blockchain or consortium could be helpful, where the students will have restricted access and all their personal information will be kept private, as it should be. Nevertheless, several national and international regulations for protecting personal data should be considered. For instance, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [38] is a significant European limitation. It prohibits the storage of personal data in an unaltered storage system, like a blockchain, and requires that the data be anonymized. As such, this is a contentious issue that needs to be resolved before blockchain can be used to register students’ and educators’ personal information in the educational space. Moreover, the blockchain’s inability to be altered presents challenges when trying to delete data, even when required for legal compliance, which contradicts the GDPR’s “right to be forgotten.” Nevertheless, a study focusing on blockchains in the education sector sought to utilize blockchain technology and its unchangeable properties to safeguard the distribution of academic certificates for students, providing a method to cancel digital certificates that have been incorrectly issued [39]. Various privacy-preserving solutions, like Secure MultiParty Computation (SMPC) techniques, commitment schemes, Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP), ring signatures, Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zkSNARK), and homomorphic hiding, are being developed to tackle privacy concerns in the blockchain, enabling users to stay anonymous and maintain data control during transactions [40].

Proof-of-work, the popular consensus technique for validating new blocks, consumes significant electrical energy and presents another possible scalability concern [12]. The Bitcoin proof-of-work, for instance, is well known to squander enough electricity annually to power a nation of the size of Switzerland [11]. In this regard, Park [8] contends that the education industry’s most complex problem is proof-of-work. As a result, the proof-of-work blockchain in education has a higher carbon footprint and increases the danger of climate change because of its high power consumption.

It was suggested that the decline in educational applications was due to proof-of-work difficulty, which would only worsen as the number of blockchain nodes increased. On the contrary, no standard example of an extensive global education blockchain compared to the millions of cryptocurrencies exists [8]. There is no strong enough incentive or reason to carry out its proof-of-work, but this might change when Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 join shortly and use a new verification method called “proof-of-stake” [8].

Nonetheless, there are a few intriguing solutions to the scalability issue. To speed up transactions, the Lightning Network, for instance, adds a new layer to the primary blockchain system [58]. Another approach is termed “sharding,” which divides node subgroups into smaller networks called “shards,” each of which is in charge of a distinct set of transactions [59]. Different blockchain systems, such as Multichain, Ethereum, and Hyperledger, offer unique characteristics and capabilities that might not be suitable for all applications. Blockchain systems, for instance, provide many consensus techniques, affecting the applications that may utilize them.