Blockchain and Education in China: New Possibilities and Challenges

Thanks to its characteristics such as decentralization, the consensus mechanism, traceability, openness and transparency, “blockchain + education” has offered new possibilities in credit management, learning track recording, and educational certification, etc. And based on that, government, experts and researchers all laid out the potentials of applying this emerging tech into education from theoretical and practical perspectives.

Application Potentials of Blockchain Technology in Education

From government level, the “White Paper on the Development of Blockchain Technology and Its Application in China” promulgated by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China in October 2016 pointed out that “since data on blockchain is transparent and cannot be tampered with, blockchain systems are well suited for student credit management, college entrance, recruitment and employment, scholarship, qualification certification, industry-academia cooperation and other aspects, and are of significant value for the healthy development of education and employment.”

Some professionals also backed up this case with their solid reasons. Among them, Dr Xu Hongwei, member of the expert group for Education Quality Test (China) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development of the United Nations, made a claim in an interview last September that by taking advantage of the traceability and non-tampering of blockchain technology, a learning and growth profile can be established for every child from the basic education stage, so that educational statistics methods and systems can be used to make a comprehensive evaluation of the growth and education of children, which may be further used for making admittance decisions by universities.

Research field echoed some of the earlier propositions with more theoretical underpinning. For instance, in a joint paper¹, Yang Xianmin, Li Xin, Wu Huanqing and Zhao Keyun pointed out that the application of blockchain technology in the finance indicates its application in education: (1) the traceability of blockchain technology can be used for the copyright protection of educational assets and intellectual achievements, solving the problem of intellectual property disputes from the source; (2) using distributed ledger technology to directly connect resources and their users can simplify the process and improve the efficiency of…