A Blockchain-based Collaboration Framework for Educational Material Sharing
Huichen Chou · 2020
Education institutes have a long history of collaboration. But when comes in creating educational materials, teachers need to take precaution in making use of existing educational contents or being referred as other's original creation. While some works can be reused and redistributed freely for educational purposes but some cannot due to copyright ownership issue. In order to provide more freedom in using existing work, we explore blockchain technology and propose a collaboration system to record multiple authorship when using other people's work. So that authors can know when their works are used and claim for economic benefit etc. We first propose to denote a corresponding block to each work so a work can be reused. Then an educational material contents various works can be denoted into a blockchain by linking work's corresponding blocks together. When update the educational material, new blocks can be added to the chain. We also propose to store the file off chain to keep the block size small. Existing online file access management function can be added to control distribution of educational material. This blockchain-based framework can be extended to support other open collaboration in reusing existing works.