An enhanced online learning environment in the time of COVID-19

Abstract

The coronavirus has forced educational institutions and universities all around the world to close their doors. There are about 1.2 billion learners outside of educational institutions in 191 nations around the world. To ensure the safety of workers, learners, and educators, the world is currently converting training, learning, and work online to reduce total disease mortality and flatten the infection curve. This paper examines the problems of the existing learning environment and proposes a framework to address them to make the transition to online learning simple, manageable, secure, and effective. Securing private data, forged certifications, payment systems, tracking student behavior, low quality of the learning process, and centralization of authority are all issues that learning environments confront. Educational institutions must build efficient, effective, transparent, immutable, and secure learning environments. We give a comprehensive analysis that introduces research papers that address learning-related concerns. Most of this research has focused on leveraging blockchain technology to improve the learning process while ignoring other crucial technologies such as the semantic web. The semantic web and blockchain will be combined to form a semantic blockchain. The semantic web is being utilized to improve the representation of learning processes based on blockchain, such as annotations, and to enable reasoning, inferences, and queries using SPARQL. In the event of a COVID-19 pandemic, the semantic blockchain will aid educational institutions in improving their learning processes. It is seen as a critical component of the next generation of e-learning systems. The proposed framework for improving the learning process via a semantic blockchain is presented in this paper.