Blockchain Technology in Higher Education: Prospects, Issues, and Challenges

Introduction

The 21^st century is regarded as the century of information, knowledge, innovations & inventions and information and communication technologies (ICTs). The innovations and inventions in capacities and capabilities of the ICTs have generated new opportunities and avenues of their applications in almost all fields of human life including education and training. The use of ICTs has generated new ways getting information instantly. And therefore, the new global opportunities and challenges seem to be linked with emerging ICTs and innovations; particularly, when these are used for development of skills and recognition of credentials of the graduates across the globe. Even so, the ever emerging ways of access to information and learning has given boost to internationalization. Seemingly, the ICTs and internationalization seem to have created new competitive learning and working environments which need new skills for learning and new ways of working. This context envisages enormous technology-based opportunities of the nature of human-technology interaction and the internationalization is serving this objective in a better way through ICTs.

Even so, the advancements in ICTs –the digital technologies appear to be transforming the entire land scape of education and training by introducing new methods of pedagogy, assessment and award of credentials. These innovative methods of credentialing consist of presenting, recognizing and validating learning outcomes which are broadly diversified and adherent to lifelong learning of the graduates. In this way the use of digital technologies in education and training is becoming supportive to new pedagogies & learning styles, instructional materials, monitoring of instructional process, assessment and certification. In higher education the use of such technologies becomes more significant as the graduates from higher education institutions (HEIs) are expected to take up their practical life.

Apparently, credentials and academic records seem to be the important and lifelong assets of the graduates. Traditionally, paper-based credentials had been prepared, maintained, awarded and recognized throughout the world. But the innovations in existing ICTs and emergence of the new ones have granted digital recognition to the credentials of graduates. Therefore, ICTs-supported digital records of credentials and open data sources are complementing traditional qualifications’ repositories. Here the digital credentialing is referred to as Blockchain or blockchain technology.