Blockchain Applications in Lifelong Learning and the Role of the Semantic Blockchain

Introduction

Education today is still controlled mostly by educational institutions, which offer quality, credibility, governance, and administrative functions. This model is not flexible enough and poses difficulties in recognising the achievements of a lifelong learner in informal and non-formal types of education. As a result, a lifelong learner’s transition from formal to informal education and vice versa can be hindered, as the achievements acquired in one type of education are not easily transferable to another (Harris & Wihak, 2017; Lundvall & Rasmussen, 2016; Mayombe, 2017; Müller et al., 2015). Generally, lifelong learners have limited control and ownership over their learning process and the data associated with their learning. This indicates the need for a learner-centred model across all types of education, offering learners with a framework for fully controlling how they are learning, how they acquire qualifications and how they share their qualifications and other learning data with third parties, such as educational institutions or employers.

The Blockchain is best known as the technological underpinning for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology, which can be thought of as a public distributed ledger, promises to revolutionise the financial world. A World Economic Forum survey in 2015 found that those polled believe that there will be a tipping point for the government use of Blockchain by 2023 (Rizzo, 2015). Governments, large banks, software vendors and companies involved in stock exchanges, especially the Nasdaq stock exchange, are investing heavily in the area. For example, the UK Government recently announced that it is investing £10 million into Blockchain research (Das, 2020) and Santander have identified 20-25 internal use cases for the technology and predict a reduction of banks’ infrastructure costs by up to £12.8 billion a year (Williams-Grut, 2015)

Blockchain technology offers a decentralised peer-to-peer infrastructure where privacy, secure archiving, consensual ownership, transparency, accountability, identity management, and trust are built in at the software and infrastructure levels. As such, the Blockchain has the potential to revolutionise education in a number of ways. In this chapter, we explore some of the applications that the Blockchain can have on certain aspects of lifelong learning, including Smart Badges, ePortfolios and tutoring. We discuss the innovative paradigms introduced by each of these applications, with the goal of building a learner-centred ecosystem for lifelong learning.

One of the key advantages of Blockchain technology is that it is decentralised, with access, and the ability to participate and publish data, open to anyone with the capacity to join a network. It is important to remember, however, that there is an existing infrastructure with some of the same features: the Web. Blockchain brings immutability and trust, among other additions, but we should take advantage of the vast wealth of existing data and standards for decentralised data publication and consumption on the Web too. In particular, one of the core design principles of the Semantic Web is the assumption that data can be published anywhere online, and by anyone, and that it should be possible to query and integrate that data without aggregating it all into a central location. We argue here that a Semantic Blockchain, encouraging interoperability between Blockchain platforms and the Semantic Web, is essential to get the most out of both technologies. This is especially important in the education sphere, where learning experiences and accreditation can be acquired from diverse independent sources and according to different learning approaches, contexts and standards, but which still need to be drawn together to form a coherent and understandable picture of an individual’s lifelong learning. We discuss approaches to the Semantic Blockchain and their applications to education in this chapter.