A Secure and Practical Decentralized Ecosystem for Shareable Education Material

Traditionally, the university landscape is highly federated, which hinders potentials for coordinated collaborations. While the lack of a strict hierarchy on the inter-university level is critical for ensuring free research and higher education, this concurrency limits the access to high-quality education materials. Especially regarding resources such as lecture notes or exercise tasks we observe a high susceptibility to redundant work and lacking quality assessment of material created in isolation by individual university institutes. To remedy this situation, in this paper we propose CORALIS, a decentralized marketplace for offering, acquiring, discussing, and improving education resources across university borders. Our design is based on a permissioned blockchain to (a) realize accountable access control via simple on-chain license terms, (b) trace the evolution of encrypted containers accumulating bundles of shareable education resources, and (c) record user comments and ratings for further improving the quality of offered education material.