Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs): Impacts and implications on the education system

The idea that the world is facing global emerging trends, technologies, and innovations lead the world to experience an uncertain, complex, and unstable future. Therefore, of the many diverse, controversial, and attractive challenges humankind deal with today, the most intense and critical is understanding the effect of the new technology revolution in various fields, especially in education. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and its subsequent quarantines have created a significant technological leap in the modern life landscape, leading to drastic and unexpected changes in education. As Covid-19 is a force to make the transition from face-to-face to online education, this study seeks to investigate whether distributed ledger technologies can help successfully tackle this new and major challenge. In this light, the researchers of the present study aimed to examine the impacts and implications of these technologies on the education system to see if they would improve the quality of education in the future.

The current study was conducted adopting a qualitative approach to provide in-depth insights and experiences of the participants. The target population of the present research included sixty-three males and females from five groups of people including higher education policymakers, teacher training instructors, information and communication technology specialists, educational technology experts, and future researchers of the educational system recruited through purposive sampling. The required data were collected through different types of interviews and narrative analysis which was conducted through WhatsApp network. The interview was selected since it was practically more convenient than other qualitative research instruments. This instrument, due to its nature, could provide a trustworthy contextualized and deep understanding of the research issue. Narrative analysis was used as the second fruitful instrument due to the centrality and impressive role digital environments play in human life. Since time and space constraints have reduced face-to-face interactions, such a flexible and attractive instrument could provide an interactive and collaborative environment for participants to tell their stories either synchronically or Asynchronically. The process of data collection continued until saturation was reached, based on which 25 interviews were conducted and 38 members participated in narrative inquiry. To analyze the data and for the themes to be extracted, thematic analysis including initial coding, focused coding, and axial coding was conducted.

The results of the data analysis led to the following themes extracted: curriculum diversity, assessing students' academic performance, quality management of learning achievements, recording management of learning outcomes, academic certificate administration, and lifelong learning. Each of the themes represents one of the blockchain implications in future education. The analysis of the interviews and narrative inquiry indicated that Blockchain, due to its specific features such as security, trust, transparency, immutability, privacy, integrity, authentication, robustness, accountability, and decentralization, plays a critical role in transforming future education.

The results of the present study can inform policymakers, educators, managers, leaders, practitioners, and all stakeholders of the education system, especially higher education, of the global emerging trends, technologies, innovations, and developments and their effects on future education. Now that the day-to-day penetration of technological advancements coincides with the Corona virus epidemic around the world, it is necessary to apply technologies and take all necessary changes  to recreate the education system in order to take a step towards improving the quality of education. It is hoped that the present study will be a reliable source for further future researches on education.