Abstract—Blockchain has emerged as a transformative technology, from its beginning as the basis of cryptocurrencies to wider applications in areas such as property registration and insurance due to its characteristic as a distributed ledger which can remove the need for a trusted third party to facilitate transaction. This spread of the technology to new application areas has been driven by the development of smart contracts – blockchain-based protocols which can automatically enforce a contract. One area where the types of problems being considered for blockchain exists is higher education. Students in higher education are increasingly mobile, and in an ever more agile world, the friction and delays caused by multiple levels of administration in higher education can cause many anxieties and hardships for students. Distance learning as a primary platform for higher education promises to open up higher education to a wider range of learners than ever before. In this paper, we review the use of blockchain in higher education and experimental implementations of a blockchain-based university transcript system in order to empower students and better fit today’s ever more agile society and then describe some experimental results in using blockchain for higher education transcripts.
Index Terms—Blockchain, higher education, certification.
Timothy Arndt is with the Department of Information Systems, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, USA (e-mail: t.arndt@csuohio.edu).
Angela Guercio is with the Department of Computer Science, Kent State University at Stark, North Canton, USA (e-mail: aguercio@kent.edu).
Cite: Timothy Arndt and Angela Guercio, "Blockchain-Based Transcripts for Mobile Higher-Education," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 84-89, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).