Sony Global Education, Inc. has announced its adoption of the distributed ledger technology to build upon it a new worldwide centralised infrastructure for educational assessment and testing scores.

Sony sees its mission in providing “a range of unifying, non-traditional services that inspire a passion for learning across the world and that offer the opportunity to act on this passion, and to create a new educational infrastructure for a connected society.” To these ends, it has developed a blockchain-based technology that enables sharing of academic proficiency and progress records through their encrypted transmission:

“With this infrastructure in place, each evaluating organization sent an individual's testing records could assess those results and calculate a score in a way that fits its own methods. Additionally, the creation of an open yet secure infrastructure has the potential to draw many educational institutions to the network, resulting in high credibility in test administration.”

The company plans to develop the new full-scale educational infrastructure by 2017, calling blockchain the “core technology” potentially able to “significantly shape the educational landscape of the future.”

As Sony announced earlier, it is also looking for distributed ledger solutions in the entertainment industry, film and music. Thus, blockchain was included as one of the subjects in Sony FinTech Innovation Challenge.

As for the use of blockchain with the aim of proficiency evaluation results transmission, a few month earlier a San Francisco-based Holberton school for Software Engineering partnered Bitproof to secure and share its diplomas via blockchain.