Employing Blockchain Technology in Instructional Design and Learning Content Creation

Blockchain technology, a secure ledger of transactions distributed among a network of computers is the technology that enables value transaction on the Internet, which has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems. Blockchain technology has widely been used in the finance and e-commerce industries for processing payments and smart contracts. Consensus algorithms, which are used to achieve agreement on data among distributed systems, are mostly determine by the type of blockchain, i.e. public, private, or federated, and are used for the verification and validation of transactions in such blockchain platforms. Current application of blockchain technology in the educational sector has mostly been for keeping student records, storing and validating diploma and degree certificate for academic credentials. Most of the available consensus algorithms for blockchain provide some form of reward to miners e.g. in the form of cryptocurrency. For blockchain to be adapted and used for other educational applications such as the creation of learning contents, the right consensus algorithm is needed. Since a Learning Content Creation will have little or no reward for participants and also not need “mining”, the consensus model selection will need to treat participants fairly so to not push them away. In this introductory paper, we briefly review the available consensus algorithms and provide our insight how the Blockchain framework can be adapted for instructional design and learning content creation. A proposed framework which will lead to further studies and the development of such system is discussed here.