A Blockchain-Based Collaboration Framework for Teaching Material Creation

Making use of existing resources to create teaching material can save effort and yield better quality. Although there are some resources that can be used freely for educational purposes, most come with significant IP protections. A technology is needed that can allow the usage of copyright restricted resources for collaboration in teaching material generation. We propose a system that provides a full record of multiple authorships and contribution shares when resources are used and such a record supports royalty sharing; its system framework is detailed in this paper. We also exploit the advantage of blockchain technology to bind participants when sharing resources and acknowledge other teachers when their teaching materials are used. In addition, the blockchain-based record can provide distributed management with security, transparency and immutability. Thus, teachers who create teaching materials have sufficient evidence to claim authorship. The smart contract on blockchain has two core functions: registering original material to allow sharing as well as recording multiple authorships of the materials used with contribution distribution. With blockchain as its core, it can be extended with addon functions, such as access management, external file storage and external version control system to support complicate editing activities. We use Remix-Ethereum IDE to implement a prototype. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we propose a blockchain-based framework to support the use of copyrighted resources when creating teaching materials. Second, we demonstrate its feasibility in a prototype implementation.