A Blockchain-based Incentive Management System for Educational Organizations
M. Fahim Ferdous Khan, Pham Duc Viet, Ken Sakamura · 2022 International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME) · 2022
Educational organizations have long used student incentive management systems either manually or digitally. Research has proven that providing incentives to students based on academic performance motivates them, which in turn helps further improve their performance. However, most of the existing digital incentive management systems are managed centrally, and hence lack transparency and integrity. Such centrally managed systems are less effective, and may even gradually demotivate students, leading to poor academic performance. Therefore, a decentralized and distributed incentive management system is necessary. To this end, by applying blockchain technology, we have developed a novel decentralized incentive management system called Token-ED. This system minimizes trust imbalance by allowing students to view their incentives via a web platform. Once an incentive has been recorded, it cannot be illegally modified. We believe such transparency will help motivate learners to improve their academic performance. Token-ED works based on a token-based incentive system. Teachers can award tokens to students based on their performance in curricular and co-curricular activities. Students can redeem their earned tokens later to get benefits - such as scholarships, gift cards, and badges - from the school. Token-ED also provides the ability to educational institutions to freely customize and deploy their tokens, making them unique and appealing. We have implemented the system and conducted a preliminary user study. The result shows that majority of the users found the system useful, easy to use, and wanted it to be implemented in their educational institutions. We believe using blockchain for incentive systems would be the norm in education sector in near future.