Abstract:

Applications of blockchain technology are versatile and can be included in a wide spectrum of Internet interactive systems in academic and industrial environments. Key industry elements that would benefit from its implementation include the Internet of Things (IoT), supply chain following, Electronic Health Records (EHR), digital forensics, identity management, E-voting, trustless payments, and similar applications. In like manner, blockchain technology can also provide secure grading schemas in academia in order to set a more transparent educational process. Furthermore, the usage of smart contracts in systems forms a new paradigm on how data should be registered, distributed, and gathered, while at the same time promises to retain the highest level of data privacy and security. Smart contracts using Ethereum, Cardano, or Polkadot platforms utilize these advantages, but also provide economic and transactional scalability which incentivizes future usages, since all parties of the ecosystem benefit. Therefore, many companies and individuals rush onto the blockchain bandwagon before considering how a ledger technology can solve their problem and add value to their system.

Blockchain itself has a large scope; it is complicated, hard to learn, repeatedly obfuscated, and hard to comprehend for novices. Thus, there are educational and technological motivations to avoid blockchain scope, learning process, and trustless system implementation. However, these two motivations are intermingled and it is crucial to introduce and establish a strong learning base to comprehend the technology. Necessarily, we highlight the importance to look at blockchain from multiple angles; technology-wise, economic and financial transformations, social implications, Internet advances, and environmental challenges. Also, blockchain can potentially level out infringement and biases in the student grading process.

Following this, we implemented a marketing learning blockchain-powered platform based on smart contract technology to examine educational potential and adoption options in the real industry. The main goal of this paper is to show the transparency of instructions, the immutability of data, and an irreversible and auditable log of student and professor choices in order to provide a clear consensus and enforce the ruleset, as an outcome of our research prior to building the platform. Secondly, we will present results and give insight into experience gained from the development of the blockchain-powered platform and provide learning incentives for the technology concepts. Additionally, we will provide testing results of these systems and give insight into the smart contract technology implemented in our learning platform.

Keywords:

Blockchain, smart contracts, trustless system implementation, learning platform.