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Application of Blockchain Technology in Education
Blockchain in education is a highly discussed topic in today’s era of growing blockchain applications in diverse sectors. As stated in a recent market report, the global blockchain market is expected to reach $163 billion by 2027 from its benchmark of $1.57 billion in 2018. This fast-paced growth of the blockchain sector is driven by its wide application in a broad range of sectors.
And the edtech sector is not an exception to this. Not only many of the leading edtech companies have started using blockchain but the dedicated blockchain education companies such as Blockcerts, Sony Global Education, Parchment, ODEM, and Disciplina, to name a few, are transforming the whole idea of edtech with the help of blockchain.
Blockchain technology has a high potential to ensure better privacy, security, and efficiency of the edtech platforms. But that’s not it. There is more to why blockchain in education is taking the whole edtech sector to a whole new level. In this blog, we will know more about blockchain in education including the application of blockchain technology in education, the benefits of blockchain in education, and more.
Application of Blockchain Technology in Education
Blockchain technology is applied in education in various ways to improve the overall learning, authentication, security, and more for education apps and websites. Let’s have a look at some of the key application areas of blockchain in education.
1. Online Learning Exchanges
One of the key applications of blockchain in education is online exchanges. With the increasing adoption of e-learning among students, online learning exchanges have become more common and frequent. And blockchain technology plays a crucial role here.
Be it the issues related to teachers not attending the lectures on time, or lack of peer learning, blockchain technology in edtech takes care of all these by acting as an advanced learning platform for both the students as well as the teachers. It also facilitates easy class schedules, tracking of payments, easy learning materials, courses and schedules offering, signing up for training, and others.
Independent teachers to trainers - they can not only set up their own blockchain-based learning platform but can store the relevant documents and information too. Many of the advanced blockchain-based edtech platforms let the students and teachers store and manage various documents, grade cards, assignment materials, forms, progress reports, and others easily.
2. Educational Qualifications Repository
Another prominent application of blockchain in education is it lets you avail a complete repository for storing educational qualifications digitally. This gives an additional layer of protection and security to your sensitive data and documents so that they cannot be accessed in any unauthenticated way, or can be tampered with, lost, or breached.
This application of blockchain technology in education is bringing a revolution in edtech as well as conventional education systems by letting the institutes provide digitally encrypted and tamper-proof certificates to the student and offering a highly secure database repository to store them.
3.Transactional Activities
Be it online learning or offline, transactional activities are a common part of any educational system. But how to ensure optimum security here? The answer lies in the wide adoption of blockchain in education to facilitate secure transactional activities.
Blockchain technology makes online payments more secure than ever while its advanced encryption mechanism offers high protection to your financial and confidential data. Furthermore, the adoption of blockchain in education has made it easier for global students to execute transactions fast, securely, and safely without waiting indefinitely or risking payment failures and other issues.
4. Authentication Mechanisms
Authentication plays a crucial role in any sector, especially the ones having a digital presence or the ones that need logins, and other authentication mechanisms. One of the major issues in the online learning system is the issue of unauthenticated access.
For instance, if an online educator is offering a paid course on his learning platform, then he must ensure that no unauthenticated ones can avail of the course. Along with that, there are issues like identity theft. But the application of blockchain in education lets you store your digital signature, or lets you verify your own identity, or execute online activities securely through its distributed ledger.
See More: Blockchain App Development: A Definitive Guide
Benefits of Blockchain in Education
The benefits of blockchain in education are unlimited and the rising application of blockchain technology in education is the outcome of that. Let’s walk you through the key benefits of blockchain in education.
1. Better Efficiency for Diverse Education Business Processes
One of the major reasons why edtech businesses are opting for blockchain technology is - it is helping them in improving their business processes and related workflows. Opting for blockchain technology in education facilitates the usage of virtual transcripts or records for all information, data, and documents be its educational achievements, degrees, or any other.
Not only this streamline the activities related to storing and retrieving such documents and the relevant information but also strengthens your overall edtech business process with reduced chances of discrepancies, data threats, and others apart from the credentials verification and secure authentication.
2. Higher Transparency
Transparency is often the key to excel for businesses and your edtech business is not an exception. One of the major benefits of blockchain in education apps and websites is that students can’t change their educational and grade certificates, skills certificates, and other relevant information. Not only does it help maintain a high transparency level in the edtech institution, but also ensures better transparency between the job seekers and employers.
3. Improved Execution of Courses
Blockchain in education helps improve the execution of various courses, modules, and training in various ways. For instance, smart-contracts-based blockchains offer automatic lessons to make the teaching and learning processes faster and easier.
This implies that one can implement and program various courses in the blockchain so that the courses can be executed whenever certain conditions are met. This optimizes the time to teach and learn, streamlines the progress measurements, and makes the whole learning process way more effective.
4. Lowers Costs
One of the lesser-known benefits of blockchain in education is that it offers a cost-effective solution for everything that is beneficial to online educators, students, as well as the edtech businesses. Blockchain can automate and streamline a majority of the processes and the related workflows - starting from course execution to students’ assessment.
Thus it reduces not only the overheads, but the time, cost, and resources associated with them. Also, it offers high reliability and security when it comes to transactions, storage, access, and other activities without needing you to opt for any additional tool or solution.
5. Better Growth Scope through Digital Assets
Blockchain in education lets you leverage a range of digital blockchain assets that can improve the whole learning mechanisms, help provide better outputs, and lets you optimize the revenue and growth of your edtech entity further.
Blockchain’s decentralized file storage is dedicated to offering a secure solution to store all digital assets, and data and lets you utilize them as per your requirements. No matter what type of digital assets are you dealing with, educational documents, business reports, confidential and sensitive data, and others - blockchain lets you save unaltered information and enables you to retrieve and deal with them as and when needed.
See More: The Role of Blockchain in Supply Chain Management: All You Need to Know
The Bottom Line
The blockchain in education is getting widely popular with each passing year. As discussed above, the application of blockchain in education is well-known now, making even more edtech players opt for blockchain technology no matter what type of edtech business they are running, online, offline, or hybrid. The growing usage of blockchain in education is enabling the edtech businesses to become more competitive and a good fit for the current as well as the future market. If you are yet to adopt blockchain technology for your edtech app, website, or platform, then now is the best time to do it to pace up with the present market and grow your business further.
If you are yet to start your edtech business, then we, at Third Rock Techkno, can help you launch your own edtech app/website. Not only edtech but here we offer a range of app and website building solutions that fit your every requirement perfectly. Take a look at our portfolio and drop us a line to get started today.