TMchain: A Blockchain-based Collaboration System for Teaching Materials

Using existing resources to create teaching materials can save effort and achieve the desired quality easily. Yet while some resources can be used freely for educational purposes, others such as textbooks or online course materials cannot. This is a particular problem during a pandemic when much teaching has gone online and the risk of teachers violating copyright is even higher. Therefore, a solution that facilitates the usage of copyright-restricted resources for generating teaching materials with royalty sharing is needed. Our work exploits the advantage of blockchain technology and proposes a system to bond participants with a smart contract; it securely registers records of multiple authorships and contribution distribution of a teaching material that reuses in part, existing resources. Such records can be used as authorship evidence to claim economic benefits when a material is used. We implement TMchain on Ethereum-Remix IDE with a core smart contract. To lower the cost of using blockchain, the material files are stored off-chain and tied to the word processing system for the final authorship and contribution share determination when a material is completed. Furthermore, we test TMchain with teaching material creation scenarios to demonstrate its effective and practical potential.