Kratos: A secure, authenticated and publicly verifiable system for educational data using the blockchain
Velislava Hillman, Varunram Ganesh · 2019
Growing interest in educational data mining (EDM) and learning analytics (LA) to leverage big data and to benefit education and the science of learning has made data ownership an important focus point for institutions and students. While EDM and LA can provide important information that help enhance the quality of teaching and learning, it has become critical to ensure data privacy and student agency over data. In this paper, we introduce Kratos: an immutable and publicly verifiable data management system that enables EDM and LA, while maintaining data privacy and empowering students with a user interface for data governance and participation in school processes. The system aims to achieve data interoperability, which facilitates EDM and LA as incentives to educational stakeholders (policy makers, educators, developers of education technologies, etc.), while prioritizing student agency over their data. Our system gives students and schools an immutable log along with comprehensive access to data that is otherwise scattered across systems and vendors. The underlying set of rules of the system are defined in a set of smart contracts, codified from existing non-virtual agreements [1] between schools and education technology (edutech) vendors. We propose the smart contracts to be deployed on a public blockchain (like Ethereum or Bitcoin), for notarizing and time-stamping various interactions which users of Kratos may have with data. Third parties requesting access to school data have a unique virtual token assigned to them on the blockchain which helps keep track of data modifications, access and use.