“We are interested in any technology that can contribute, particularly within a UK context, to making higher education better value for money. The centralized model of present-day learning is no longer sustainable – indeed, blockchain technology allows for a total disintermediation and disaggregation of higher education. Today, learning happens increasingly outside the brick-and-mortar lecture hall universities: it happens on online platforms, within communities of like-minded individuals, or by contributing to projects and initiatives in the real world. Blockchain technology may hold the answer to securely and verifiably collating the outcomes of this new distributed learning reality.”
Video Jump Points:
Blockchain is most commonly known as the technology underpinning the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. But in recent years the open source code of the Bitcoin blockchain has been taken and extended by many groups to expand its capabilities. 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. 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 £10M into blockchain research 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.
The reach of blockchain technology will go beyond the financial sector however, through the use of ‘smart contracts’ which allow business and legal agreements to be stored and executed online. For example, the startup company Tallysticks aims to use blockchain based smart contracts to automate invoicing. In October, 2015 Visa and DocuSign showcased a proof of concept demonstrating how smart contracts could be used to greatly speed up the processes involved in car rental – rental cars can be driven out of the car park without any need to fill in or sign forms. The ability to run smart contracts led Forbes to recently run an article comparing the future impact of blockchains to that of the Web and Internet.
We believe the blockchain technology and smart contracts can also be used in education in many interesting and potentially revolutionary scenarios. On this website you can see some of the ways we see the future of education developing using the blockchain and what we are doing to progress towards our vision.
A blockchain is a publicly shared immutable ledger – an append only log of transactions which uses crypto-currency techniques to minimise any security risk. As can be seen in the figure above, transactions are contained in blocks which are linked together through a series of hash pointers. Any tampering of a block can be detected since the hash pointer to it would no longer be valid. As a ledger system it is very open. In addition to the source code being openly available a key feature of blockchains is that in principle every user has their own copy of the entire blockchain. In fact, there is no central or master copy simply the multiple copies held by the volunteers in the user community. Volunteers are rewarded for their effort through a number of algorithmic processes which can result in payment. Small payments can be attached to individual transactions. Consensus on what types of blocks and transactions can be part of the blockchain is automatically reached according to whether the majority of blockchain holders accept newly proposed blocks. This attribute leads to a system where consensus is hardwired into the software. Without the need for any central control or mediator blockchains allow for leaderless democracy — a new way of governing human behaviour online through ‘one computer one vote’. In this way, a blockchain can act as a provenance protocol for sharing data across disparate semi-trusting organizations.
We envision a world in which the awarding and validation of qualifications no longer occur exclusively under the management of an education institution or an employer and individual students, teachers, and peers take more ownership of the learning experience and its outcomes without compromising on safety, security, and accessibility. The centralised model of the present is no longer sustainable: learning happens increasingly outside the brick-and-mortar lecture halls of schools, colleges, and universities on online platforms, within communities of like-minded individuals, or by contributing to projects and initiatives in the real-world. Learning is far more international than it used to be: key education players open campuses abroad, while students travel to different countries to improve their employability prospects. In the networked, digitally empowered world of the 21st century, education providers often do not have remit or in fact the means and capacity to cover the range of activities learners engage with, which attest their achievements, knowledge, and skills.
We believe that blockchain technologies may hold an answer to collating the outcomes of this new distributed learning reality and we intent to explore the possibilities that this infrastructure could provide.
In a typical education scenario students learn through a number of pedagogical activities and are assessed and receive feedback from teachers. Learning occurs either face-to-face, online, or a mixture of the two, all under the control of an educational institution providing quality, credibility, governance, and administrative functions. While the educational institution issues documentation that certify the achievement of major milestones in a degree (including transcripts), students are responsible for preserving and storing the work they had to carry out for their courses (e.g., essays, lab experiments, designs, software etc.) and the feedback given by the teachers for later use (e.g., to show to potential employers, apply for a study programme, internship, scholarship etc.). This creates a high overhead for the students, as they need to keep track, organize, and safely archive the relevant information, which often includes many individual pieces of work, stored as different media (e.g., emails, CAD files, pictures, sound, scans etc.), created over months or years of study. In the same time, the recipient of this information (a potential employer, the admissions team of educational institutions etc.) has very limited means to check the evidence submitted or to assess the candidate, as they have little to no context of the relevance of the work carried out to standard qualifications and skills frameworks. Blockchain based ePortfolios can address these challenges through the development of an open decentralized, peer-to-peer platform, in which control of and responsibility for this information flow is radically disintermediated, away from educational institutions to students and teachers. This will be achieved by using blockchain-based distributed ledgers, a technology that enables the secure and resilient management of distributed data in combination with data analytics techniques that add scale and flexibility to the way levels of qualifications are defined and granted.
“We are interested in any technology that can contribute, particularly within a UK context, to making higher education better value for money. The centralized model of present-day learning is no longer sustainable – indeed, blockchain technology allows for a total disintermediation and disaggregation of higher education. Today, learning happens increasingly outside the brick-and-mortar lecture hall universities: it happens on online platforms, within communities of like-minded individuals, or by contributing to projects and initiatives in the real world. Blockchain technology may hold the answer to securely and verifiably collating the outcomes of this new distributed learning reality.”
Video Jump Points:
Blockchain is most commonly known as the technology underpinning the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. But in recent years the open source code of the Bitcoin blockchain has been taken and extended by many groups to expand its capabilities. 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. 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 £10M into blockchain research 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.
The reach of blockchain technology will go beyond the financial sector however, through the use of ‘smart contracts’ which allow business and legal agreements to be stored and executed online. For example, the startup company Tallysticks aims to use blockchain based smart contracts to automate invoicing. In October, 2015 Visa and DocuSign showcased a proof of concept demonstrating how smart contracts could be used to greatly speed up the processes involved in car rental – rental cars can be driven out of the car park without any need to fill in or sign forms. The ability to run smart contracts led Forbes to recently run an article comparing the future impact of blockchains to that of the Web and Internet.
We believe the blockchain technology and smart contracts can also be used in education in many interesting and potentially revolutionary scenarios. On this website you can see some of the ways we see the future of education developing using the blockchain and what we are doing to progress towards our vision.
A blockchain is a publicly shared immutable ledger – an append only log of transactions which uses crypto-currency techniques to minimise any security risk. As can be seen in the figure above, transactions are contained in blocks which are linked together through a series of hash pointers. Any tampering of a block can be detected since the hash pointer to it would no longer be valid. As a ledger system it is very open. In addition to the source code being openly available a key feature of blockchains is that in principle every user has their own copy of the entire blockchain. In fact, there is no central or master copy simply the multiple copies held by the volunteers in the user community. Volunteers are rewarded for their effort through a number of algorithmic processes which can result in payment. Small payments can be attached to individual transactions. Consensus on what types of blocks and transactions can be part of the blockchain is automatically reached according to whether the majority of blockchain holders accept newly proposed blocks. This attribute leads to a system where consensus is hardwired into the software. Without the need for any central control or mediator blockchains allow for leaderless democracy — a new way of governing human behaviour online through ‘one computer one vote’. In this way, a blockchain can act as a provenance protocol for sharing data across disparate semi-trusting organizations.
We envision a world in which the awarding and validation of qualifications no longer occur exclusively under the management of an education institution or an employer and individual students, teachers, and peers take more ownership of the learning experience and its outcomes without compromising on safety, security, and accessibility. The centralised model of the present is no longer sustainable: learning happens increasingly outside the brick-and-mortar lecture halls of schools, colleges, and universities on online platforms, within communities of like-minded individuals, or by contributing to projects and initiatives in the real-world. Learning is far more international than it used to be: key education players open campuses abroad, while students travel to different countries to improve their employability prospects. In the networked, digitally empowered world of the 21st century, education providers often do not have remit or in fact the means and capacity to cover the range of activities learners engage with, which attest their achievements, knowledge, and skills.
We believe that blockchain technologies may hold an answer to collating the outcomes of this new distributed learning reality and we intent to explore the possibilities that this infrastructure could provide.
In a typical education scenario students learn through a number of pedagogical activities and are assessed and receive feedback from teachers. Learning occurs either face-to-face, online, or a mixture of the two, all under the control of an educational institution providing quality, credibility, governance, and administrative functions. While the educational institution issues documentation that certify the achievement of major milestones in a degree (including transcripts), students are responsible for preserving and storing the work they had to carry out for their courses (e.g., essays, lab experiments, designs, software etc.) and the feedback given by the teachers for later use (e.g., to show to potential employers, apply for a study programme, internship, scholarship etc.). This creates a high overhead for the students, as they need to keep track, organize, and safely archive the relevant information, which often includes many individual pieces of work, stored as different media (e.g., emails, CAD files, pictures, sound, scans etc.), created over months or years of study. In the same time, the recipient of this information (a potential employer, the admissions team of educational institutions etc.) has very limited means to check the evidence submitted or to assess the candidate, as they have little to no context of the relevance of the work carried out to standard qualifications and skills frameworks. Blockchain based ePortfolios can address these challenges through the development of an open decentralized, peer-to-peer platform, in which control of and responsibility for this information flow is radically disintermediated, away from educational institutions to students and teachers. This will be achieved by using blockchain-based distributed ledgers, a technology that enables the secure and resilient management of distributed data in combination with data analytics techniques that add scale and flexibility to the way levels of qualifications are defined and granted.
Ethereum is a platform for decentralised applications, built on top of a blockchain mechanism, which can be used for public data storage and computation. It acts as an immutable public ledger, which provides strong cryptographic guarantees for data integrity. One definitive feature of the Ethereum platform is the ability to execute Turing-complete Smart Contracts. A Smart Contract is a program on the blockchain. We have been investigating the possibilities that the Ethereum blockchain infrastructure affords.
Below you can see some screencasts of some of our experiments with Ethereum:
Third, A. and Domingue, J. (2017) LinkChains: Exploring the space of decentralised trustworthy Linked Data, Workshop: Decentralising the Semantic Web at International Semantic Web Conference, Vienna, Austria
Herian, R. (2017) Blockchain and the (re)imagining of trusts jurisprudence.
Third, A. and Domingue, J. (2017) The Irrefutable History of You: Distributed Ledgers and Semantics for Ubiquitous Personal Ratings, Proceedings of the Re-coding Black Mirror 2017 Workshop, eds. Pinelopi Troullinou, Ilaria Tiddi, Mathieu d’Aquin, 16th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Vienna, Austria, October 22, 2017
Third, A. and Domingue, J. (2017) LinkChains: Exploring the space of decentralised trustworthy Linked Data, , Proceedings of the Decentralising the Semantic Web Workshop, eds. Ruben Verborgh, Andrei Sambra and Tobias Kuhn, 16th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Vienna, Austria, October 22, 2017
Third, A., Tiddi, I., Bastianelli, E., Valentine, C. and Domingue, J. (2017) Towards the temporal streaming of graph data on distributed ledgers, Workshop: 2nd International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers at ESWC, Portorož, Slovenia
Third, A. and Domingue, J. (2017) Linked Data Indexing of Distributed Ledgers, Workshop: LD-DL@WWW 1st International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers at WWW 2017 The 26th International World Wide Web Conference, Perth, Australia
Third, A., Domingue, J., Bachler, M. and Quick, K. (2016) Blockchains and the Web Position Paper, A W3C Workshop on Distributed Ledgers on the Web, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sharples, M. and Domingue, J. (2016) The Blockchain and Kudos: a Distributed System for Educational Record, Reputation and Reward, 11th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, Lyon, France, Springer.
Herian, R. (2016) Trusteeship in a Post-Trust World: Property, Trusts Law and the Blockchain.
Google Alert – BlockchainWeb 3.0 could revolutionise the way higher education is delivered, but will it be used as a force for good, asks Martin Hall
Credit: Martin Hall, The Times – Higher Education
“Amid the outcry over David Cameron’s tax affairs is the UK prime minister’s intervention in 2013 to block EU transparency rules regarding offshore trusts. It was decided that trusts should not be held to the same standards as companies when it came to…”
Credit: Robert Herian, The Conversation
XRP Prices: Patience Is Warranted
2017 was a great year for investors, where the market environment was characterized by a constant barrage of new all-time highs, low volatility, and a number of high-flying sectors taking center stage. 2018 is turning out to be a whole different...
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Litecoin News Update
Remember when hackers broke into the Mt. Gox exchange? That security breach—which took place several years ago...
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Ripple News Update
Although XRP prices are flashing red this morning, Ripple is actually net positive for the weekend. From its Friday lows to the time of...
EU Blockchain Observatory & Forum
The Blockchain Observatory and Forum will highlight key developments of the blockchain technology, promote European actors and reinforce European engagement with multiple stakeholders involved in blockchain activities.
Blockchain in Education
JRC Science for Policy Report
APPII
Collaborating to enhance the employability of students through their resume platform
Learning on the Block: Could Smart Transactional Models Help Power Personalised Learning?
Credit: KnowledgeWorks
What we learned from designing an academic certificates system on the blockchain
Credit: medium
Kottackal Business Solution Pvt. Ltd
Investigating collaboration options
Uber-U is Already Here
Credit: teachonline
BadgeChain
Credit: medium
Own Your Achievements: Three Ways Blockchain Tech is Disrupting Education
Credit: Blockchain Futures Lab
Blockchain Futures Lab
Credit: IFTF
A joint venture between the Open University and the Knowledge Media Institute.
This event took place on Tuesday 5 December 2017 at 10:05
Published on Oct 22, 2017
Published October 12th, 2017
Published October 9th, 2016
Published May 29th, 2016
“Hugh Halford-Thompson of BTL gave an introduction to blockchain technologies before talking in more detail about various use cases across different sectors including payments and settlement, reconciliation, and traceability. He also discussed how…”
This event took place on Tuesday 24 May 2016 at 13:00
“Blockchain technology has been in the news recently, mainly because it aims to provide an alternative model of network computing platform that is decentralised and trustless, the underlying properties that made Bitcoin popular.”
This event took place on 24th February 2016 at 2:00pm
24 September 2018, 21 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BS
12-13 June 2018, 99 City Road Conference Centre, London, EC1Y 1AX
Future Edtech is the only event to bring together Institutional Leaders with technologies and academia to discuss best in class strategies and tools to elevate student experience and engagement on and off campus with the use of technology. Find out more about this event
1 May 2018 (14:00 to 17:00), Alan Turing Institute, British Library Enigma room, 96 Euston Rd, Kings Cross, London NW1 2DB
The workshop will explore a number of areas where decisions about risks and entitlement are often made based on information that is partial and erroneous, and with resulting suboptimal outcomes for individuals, communities, organisations and government, including reputation damage, and political controversy.
24th April 2018, Co-located with the WebConference @ Lyon – France
We envision the workshop as a forum for researchers and practitioners from Distributed Ledgers and Linked Data to come together to discuss common challenges; propose solutions to shortcomings of existing architectures; and identify synergies for joint initiatives. The ultimate goal is the creation of a Web of Interoperable Ledgers. Find out more about this event
5th December 2017, The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT
The Blockchain Conference 2017 where leading experts will explain how technology based on distributed ledgers will shape the future of services. Find out more about this event
1st December 2017, RSA House, Durham Street Auditorium, 8 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6EZ
It has never been more important to recognise, recruit and retain talent in the workplace and Digital Credentials help us see people for who they are and who they could be. Find out more about this event
20th November 2017, Institute of Engineering and Technology, Savoy Place, London
We’ll be gathering hundreds of engineers, IT decision-makers and industry leaders that specialise across a number of key sectors to offer a holistic programme of debate and insight into the technologies of the future. Find out more about this event
31st October 2017, Webinar at KMi, The Open University
Blockchains are best known as the technological underpinning for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency highlighted for its potential to revolutionise the financial world. Find out more about this event
12th October 2017, Webinar
It can be hard to see where Blockchain will go next, or how it can be used in the real world. Discover the future of Blockchain here. Find out more about this event
20th September 2017, The Brewery, London EC1Y 4SD
Blockchain Live is open to anyone with an interest in unlocking the value of blockchain whether taking a first look into what blockchain is and what it means or those more advanced and looking for answers to specific questions. Find out more about this event
4th April 2017, Co-located at WWW 2017, Perth, Australia
1st International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers. Find out more about this event
29th May 2017, Co-located at ESWC 2017, Portoroz, Slovenia
2nd International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers. Find out more about this event
26-28 October 2016, Bologna, Italy
The 14th conference on ePortfolios, Open Badges, Personal Ledgers, Identities, Trust, Blockchains…Find out more about this event
19-24 September 2016, Hyatt on the Bund, Shanghai
Ethereum Foundation and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs announce a blockbuster event combining Devcon2 and the 2nd Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai…Find out more about this event
29-30 June 2016, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts
What timelines make sense for looking at standardization for Web-centric aspects of blockchain technologies? Who are the key stakeholders (individuals, organizations, and industries) involved to make sense of the blockchain landscape? What are the next steps?…Find out more about this event
29 June 2016, Brussels, Belgium
Digital Social Innovation has been put on the map through the focus on Collective Awareness Programs. In this light we are organizing a policy workshop concerning Digital Social Innovation for Europe. We want to bring together innovators throughout Europe and leaders from CAPS projects with…Find out more about this event
21 June 2016, Brussels, Belgium
This one day policy workshop will bring together experts, practitioners, politicians, civil servants and citizens interested to discuss what role the European Institutions and in particular the Horizon 2020 public funds for research should be playing as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) begin to encroach on areas far removed from…Find out more about this event
Our department is a research department, so we do not offer any blockchain courses at present. We have collated a list of some of the online courses currently out there. Please contact us if you know of other courses you feel we should be listing.
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies
CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium (C4)
Master of Science degree in Digital Currency – Cyprus’ University of Nicosia – Cyprus
The UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies
IOHK and University of Edinburgh Blockchain Technology Laboratory
Surrey Centre for Digital Economy (CoDE)
I am a Project Officer / Developer in KMi. At present, I am experimenting with the Ethereum blockchain to see how it might be used in a number of Educational scenarios. Previously I worked primarily on collective intelligence and knowledge mapping software and was the lead developer for Compendium and Cohere and am currently the lead developer for Evidence Hub,
Debate Hub and LiteMap.
I’m KMi’s Director and I’m interested in how blockchains can be used within higher education and corporate training and also the relationship between semantics, big data and blockchains. Within the learning area I see a number of scenarios where radical improvements may occur including: embedding micro certification within blockchains; the development of educational currencies to support the crowdsourced accreditation of ‘soft skills’ such as collaboration, communication and leadership by peers; and new disruptive models for teaching and learning where intermediary layers are removed resulting in dramatically reduced costs and increased openness. Interoperability between blockchains and the automation of a number of tasks associated with the development of blockchain applications (DApps) through semantic technologies is a second focus.
Robert researches equity, trusts, fiduciary and property law, and is particularly interested in how post-trust paradigms facilitated by the blockchain will impact legally, economically and politically upon these different areas of private law. Publications include: “How blockchain can be used to make trusts more transparent”, The Conversation, April 8th 2016; “Trusteeship in a post-trust world: Property, Trusts Law and the Blockchain” Strategic Change (forthcoming).
I am a software engineering researcher, with a particular interest in the development of evolving critical systems. My research interests in recent years have been on engineering adaptive software, with an emphasis on a achieving a variety of software qualities including safety, security, privacy awareness, forensic readiness, and usability. My interests in block chain technologies are derived from applications that demand security, privacy and transparency.
Combining my research interests in personal logging and digital forensics, I’m interested in how digital ledger technologies can be used to maintain forensically ready logs of both people and objects.
I am Communications Projects Manager working in the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi). Currently I am investigating innovative ways in which the blockchain can be employed within the field of education. I am the lead developer of the Stadium Live, interactive webcasting system which provides a system for live broadcasting, at scale, allowing the remote audience to paticipate live with the event through a range of widgets and text chat etc. Previous projects have included Flashmeeting, Hexagon and FlashVlog.
My research is focused on automated analysis of images and video within the wider area of Data Science. With respect to blockchains, I am interested in their theoretical foundations and in their applications for smart contracts, in particular, how to keep records of and verify assured elements of contracts.
I am a researcher in KMi looking into the connections and interoperability between blockchains and the (Semantic) Web, particularly Linked Data. These are useful for a wide range of use cases in education, scientific data and scholarly publication and medical data, primarily for the purposes of data integration between trusted and untrusted sources, and providing guarantees that data has not been corrupted or tampered with, and can be reliably identified as being tied to a specific timestamp.
I am a project officer in KMi with a long history of European collaborative projects where micro-accreditation would have been a welcome addition. My web application development thus far has been in PHP with Javascript libraries and APIs, supported by mySQL databases.
My research focuses on changes and adaptations both at design and runtime of software systems. In the wake of the missing flight MH370 in 2014, my recent research interest has been on implementing “live blackboxes” to track and verify aircraft in motion using blockchain technologies.
The OpenBlockchain team have a wealth of knowledge and experience and a testbed architecture to support investigations in the use of blockchain in almost any scenario imaginable. We provide Research Consultancy Services that are tailored to your individual needs and can support anything from improving your understanding of the potential of blockchain, to in depth technical discussion and testing of scenarios at prototype stage. We are keen to build research relationships with commercial and academic partners and to identify sources of research funding that we can leverage to fund longer term relationships. We have already submitted a number of bids to research grant funds in the UK, working with commercial partners in domains including energy management, professional development, teaching and recruitment.
Our Research Consultancy starts from as little as £1000 per day and we will always enter into initial conversations without any fee.
If you have an idea you would like to discuss, just use the contact form and tell us a little about it – we will be happy to start a conversation and work out how we can help you.
