‘It Has a Lot of Potential!’: Use of Blockchain Technology for Education Records

The paper explores the perceptions of university students and their desired features on the use of blockchain technology for the management of education records. A literature review forms the theoretical basis of the research allowing to explore how education records are managed nowadays and the potential for the use of blockchain technology in this area. The theoretical framework is then used to discuss the research findings. The research adopts the interpretive qualitative approach and collects data through a focus group interview with university students. Computer assisted thematic data analysis yields five key themes: current usage of university education records, understanding how blockchain works, sustainability of blockchain, security of blockchain and implementation of blockchain for education records. Participants were generally positive towards the use of blockchain for the management of education records and saw it as one of the potential future solutions. Nevertheless, they voiced some reservations regarding the high energy consumption, costs and security towards a possible use of the blockchain technology. Therefore, careful implementation would be needed, with increased focus on usability, solving some security and sustainability issues and ensuring a fair and transparent access model.This research contributes to the current body of knowledge within informatics by empowering students to share their perception of possible development of student record systems based on blockchain technology. It also provides insights which can be used in the future to achieve a more user focused design of education records management systems.

Complementary Data as Metadata: Building Context for the Reuse of Video Records of Practice

Data reuse is often dependent on context external to the data. At times, this context is actually additional data that helps data reusers better assess and/or understand the target data upon which they are focused. We refer to these data as complementary data and define these as data external to the target data which could be used as evidence in their own right. In this paper, we specifically we focus on video records of practice in education. Records of practice are a type of data that more broadly document events surrounding teaching and learning. Video records of practice are an interesting case of data reuse as they can be extensive (e.g., days or weeks of video of a classroom), result in large files sizes, and require both metadata and other complementary data in order for reusers to understand the events depicted in the video. Through our mixed methods study, consisting of a survey of data reusers in 4 repositories and 44 in-depth interviews, we identified the types of complementary data that assist reusers of video records of practice for either teaching and/or research. While there were similarities in the types of complementary data identified as important to have when reusing VROP, the rationales and motivations for seeking out particular complementary data differed depending on whether the intended use was for teaching or research. While metadata is an important and valuable means of describing data for reuse, data’s meaning is often constructed through comparison, verification, or elucidation in reference to other data.

Infant formula composition and educational performance: a protocol to extend follow-up for a set of randomised controlled trials using linked administrative education records

IntroductionThe effect of infant nutrition on long-term cognition is important for parents and policy makers. However, most clinical trials typically have short follow-up periods, when measures of cognition are poorly predictive of later function. The few trials with longer-term follow-up have high levels of attrition, which can lead to selection bias, and in turn to erroneous interpretation of long-term harms and benefits of infant nutrition. We address the need for unbiased, long-term follow-up, by linking measures of educational performance from administrative education records. Educational performance is a meaningful marker of cognitive function in children and it is strongly correlated with IQ. We aim to evaluate educational performance for children who, as infants, were part of a series of trials that randomised participants to either nutritionally modified infant formula or standard formula. Most trialists anticipated positive effects of these interventions on later cognitive function.Methods and analysisUsing data from 1923 participants of seven randomised infant formula trials linked to the English National Pupil Database (NPD), this study will provide new insights into the effect of nutrient intake in infancy on school achievement. Our primary outcome will be the mean differences in z-scores between intervention and control groups for a compulsory Mathematics exam sat at age 16. Secondary outcomes will be z-scores for a compulsory English exam at age 16 and z-scores for compulsory Mathematics and English exams at age 11. We will also evaluate intervention effects on the likelihood of receiving special educational needs (SEN) support. All analyses will be performed separately by trial.Ethics and disseminationResearch ethics approval, and approval from the Health Research Authority Confidentiality Advisory Group, has been obtained for this study. The results of this study will be disseminated to scientific, practitioner, and lay audiences, submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals, and will contribute towards a PhD dissertation.