Abstract
Open learning is now facing a complex higher education ecosystem that involves a variety of heterogeneous information systems and comprises decentralized stakeholders, such as universities, professors, students, and software vendors. Authentic, non-repudiable, and fast available data sharing among open learning information systems and stakeholders is a key issue that remains unresolved. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a consortium blockchain extended architecture featuring integration and cross-chain functions to provide a unified and trusted data-sharing infrastructure for open learning. The overall architecture consists of three elements: a blockchain-integrated open learning scenario schema; a blockchain-integrated open learning application model; and a pragmatic blockchain integration framework. The proposed blockchain integration framework is implemented based on Hyperledger Fabric 1.4. A trusted open-learning behavior and achievement management application is developed as a proof-of-concept which integrates two educational institutions’ four productional learning systems into a blockchain network and has stably run over six months. A suite of experiments is designed and executed to verify our blockchain system’s viability and scalability. The test result shows the implementation of the blockchain system is competent for the production environment and outperforms related works investigated. However, it does have limitations and optimization potential, which will be studied in the future.
Highlights
Today, open learning is facing new problems as the evolution of higher education has come up as an increasingly complex ecosystem, which comprises various stakeholders such as universities, faculties, students, higher educational institutions, governmental sectors, employer entities, and EdTech software companies [1,2]
We consider the following requirements when implementing the architecture: (i): Trustworthiness: open learning provenance data must be collected and stored, immutably, and must be trustworthy; (ii): Transparency of provenance data sharing: Blockchains are fundamentally transparent, where data and interactions are visible to all open learning participants in the blockchain network; (iii): Privacy: open learning provenance data should be shared between authorized personnel; (iv): Interoperability: open learning provenance data collected from legacy HEI open learning systems should be integrated
The most vital part of our research is to propose an overall architecture consisting of an open learning business schema, a conceptual application model, and a pragmatic blockchain integration framework, as a guideline and infrastructure for a blockchain-enhanced trusted open learning application development
Summary
Open learning is facing new problems as the evolution of higher education has come up as an increasingly complex ecosystem, which comprises various stakeholders such as universities, faculties, students, higher educational institutions, governmental sectors, employer entities, and EdTech software companies [1,2]. Professors giving lectures utilizing diverse remote teaching tools and students carrying out learning processes on different HEI software platforms are very common states. These proprietary HEI informational systems are usually heterogenous, decentralized, and difficult to interact with. Sustainability 2021, 13, 14069 isolated, globally distributed HEI information systems. It is difficult to achieve effective sharing of open learning resources and, a great waste of educational resources can occur [2,7,8,9,10]
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