How Blockchain can help University?

From a normal cryptocurrency, the blockchain starts providing a wide array of its extensive applications and use cases. The base of development starts with education, and this will normally reflect on other areas like science, healthcare, agriculture, industry and many more. So most countries now focus on giving an advanced form of academic credentials to its students. With the boom in the blockchain, most schools and education societies found their interest in it.





Currently, there are more than 30000 universities across the globe, providing millions of university courses. In this case, managing such a huge volume of content without any flaws or frauds seems tedious and strenuous. In this case, a technology that is diversified, decentralized can become a great aid in maintaining the trust in certificates, proof of learning and reputation. The blockchain for universities can very well fit into this, providing great transparency and security to the whole system. Blockchain for academic records can improve the record credibility to the core via immutable ledger technology encrypted for the action.





How blockchain for universities can bring in the revolution?

The value and credibility of university certificates or degrees play a vital role in acquiring a decent well-paid job. Technological advancement creates a short distance from the employer to its right employee. It is the duty of the educational institution to provide their students identity in a trusted and cross-platform mode so that the students can produce it anywhere confidently without any insecurity feeling.





Benefits of Blockchain For Universities

Document Verification

Blockchain credential verification for universities can benefit the educational institute in large. The university can provide a trusted platform to its graduates to verify their identity from anywhere in this globe. How this can happen? Only through technical integration with current technology. Blockchain for universities can be the correct solution for this. Many universities already are on the way towards this achievement. Universities and schools already started issuing their students with blockchain verifiable trusted academic records. By providing blockchain document verification for universities, it creates a proof of trust between two parties.





document verification using blockchain (blocktick)





For example, Bob holds a university degree from a University say ‘ X ‘ and he approaches a recruiter ‘ Y ’ and applies for a specific post with his current education qualification. For a recruiter, the process of confirming the identity seems to more complicated. The recruiter has to undergo many paper works and even some phone calls to confirm the authenticity of Bob’s academic background. Most recruiters are subjected to undergo time-consuming verification processes. For this reason, many of them mostly ignore this verification process, creating future challenges if something goes wrong in it.





Suppose if Bob comes from a university who provide a blockchain verifiable certificate, the above-said process can be simplified and can be completed in a single click from the side of a recruiter. All that the recruiter needs to do is, confirm who is the issuer of a certain document, the blockchain immutable database eventually will provide its verifiable academic credential to the needy.





By providing academic credentials in the blockchain, it refers that the university is providing their graduate a certain authority ie. a verified Identity. A proof of KYC is also provided within this act. Anyone can authenticate the credential through blockchain and confirm the identity.





Infrastructure Maintenance

More data more security, this is how the change has brought in this decade. With advance infrastructure more concurrent data availability is needed. With the improvement in technological devices such as using more sophisticated IoT devices, collecting of data seems quite easy. With the integration of blockchain, one can assure with more trusted data and security.





In a university the network infrastructure is very important, the keeping of that much data from a malicious attack is quite difficult. One way of achieving a high level of protection in defending against the 51% attack by improving the size and scalability of the blockchain. If we use an immutable ledger technology that is blockchain, it helps to save the infrastructure network from failing. One can use tamper-proof ledger sharing across devices. University may contain data of students, professors, academic details, course details, administration department details, their payments, their camera backups, and so many activities in and around. Keeping this record in a trusted place is so important in terms of infrastructure maintenance. Keeping this in blockchain will help to maintain a correct order for certain institutions.





Reduce Paper Works

For an institution, paper works are more than any fields and it is unavoidable also. Trust of creating paperwork is because of data loss from a computer or any other form of technical device. With the introduction of DLT(Distributed Ledger Technology), things have changed. Blockchain for academic records, make it easy to store every record in cloud data in an immutable way. One form of storage is the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Where one can store data in a secure and easy access way without the fear of losing data from hacking or any other way. Record keeping can be done automatically by using smart contracts. The smart contract can eliminate human errors and make record-keeping work efficiently and smoothly. And also helps in minimizing fraud and can create authenticity in records.





Universities can create digital access and copyright access to specific content that they are owned. University Professors, for instance, can be rewarded on the basis of research and journals they have published, and also can use their own teaching material by authenticating its proof. Another advantage of introducing the smart contract in document verification is that it can reduce the time-consuming paperwork of conventional education methods.





MOOCs from Universities

Many great universities have started to facilitate online courses and certificate programs. Massive open online course (MOOCs) is a simple online course provided by elegant universities giving onboard access to students around the globe. Since its open for anyone, students can go through course content in a free to some extent. By providing accurate and valid content through DLT(Distributed Ledger Technology) the value of MOOCs can be improved.





MOOCS course is in an urge of expanding towards higher education, now it's considered that more than 60 million online users, populating more than 10000 courses are working towards a high credential graduate program. In that case, many online courses are a fraud and profound for trustworthiness. If the universities are able to provide immutable data access through blockchain, it can eliminate fraud and keep a great value on any cross-border. The security and real demand for MOOC can be improved by providing secure credentials in the form of trust and agreement among major reputed MOOC providers.





Current Trends

Universities have started offering some specialized courses on the blockchain. Applicability has been increasing and its use case in schools, universities, MOOCs, Corporates, and knowledge-seeking areas is increased day by day. Automatically trust in the hierarchical structure is diminishing and focus is migrating towards decentralized technology. Even though technology has changed the way trust is built its still reputation is held by a certain institution by forming a great trust in their quality of research, course they provide, the professor who taught and so on. Blockchain can play a very good role here and one could imagine a sort of web of teachers and learners that deploys blockchain to cut out institutions.





In short, the benefits of blockchain for universities and other educational institutes are large in number as we dig deep into the potentialities of distributed ledger technologies.



