Block-ED: The Proposed Blockchain Solution for Effectively Utilising Educational Resources

In this day and age, access to the Internet has become very easy, thereby providing access to different educational resources posted on the cloud even easier. Open access to resources, such as research journals, publications, articles in periodicals etc. is restricted to retain their authenticity and integrity, as well as to track and record their usage in the form of citations. This gives the author of the resource his fair share of credibility in the community, but this may not be the case with open educational resources such as lecture notes, presentations, test papers, reports etc. that are produced and used internally within an organisation or multiple organisations. This calls for the need to build a system that stores a permanent and immutable repository of these resources in addition to keeping a track record of who utilises them. Keeping in view the above-mentioned problem in mind, the present research attempts to explore how a Blockchain based system called Block-ED can be used to help the educational community manage their resources in a way to avoid any unauthorised manipulations or alterations to the documents, as well as recognise how this system can provide an innovative method of giving credibility to the creator of the resource whenever it is utilised.