Created by Helen Murphy as part of the Digital Futures course for the MSc in Digital Education, this resource looks into some of the claims around blockchain technology in Higher Education, why they may or may not be justified, and how to become better equipped to analyse potential blockchain projects from a critical perspective.

 

The resource is provided on a weebly.com website and is made up of four main sections:

Key Concepts

Here we’ll learn what the blockchain is, and how it is perceived that it might be useful in higher education. In particular, we’ll spend some time considering one potential application: the independent and decentralised verification of credentials.

A Critical Toolkit

In this section, our goal will be to develop a ‘critical toolkit’, a list of productive questions with which we might assess any potential blockchain projects in higher education. We’ll explore what might constitute this toolkit.

A Critical Experiment

This section will introduce you to an imagined instance of the way the blockchain might be used in education. We’ll put to the test the critical toolkit developed in the previous section to anayse and critique this idea.

Conclusions

Finally, we’ll bring all of our ideas together, summarise what we’ve learned, and consider how we might move forward better armed with a set of critical precepts to assess the introduction of blockchain.

 

Go to Education and the Blockchain

See other OER created by Digital Futures students

Learn more about the Digital Futures course

 

 

Header image: Chain, by Free-Photos (Pixabay), CC0