The Pathways to Oregon State University (P2OSU) initiative builds trust and long-term relationships to create a lasting impact for students and increase opportunity and access in the Oregon education system. The intention is to provide resources for underprivileged students and to also ease the transmission of information between different institutions. The objective of this project is to provide an architecture design of the blockchain which future teams can build upon.
We designed a blockchain-based application which creates a backbone system for student academic journeys from k12 through post-secondary education. The backbone synthesizes information about existing programs and resources and identifies connections and opportunities across student academic transitions. Using the blockchain, these resources can then be sent directly to students who would find them relevant.
The P2OSU application will support student-focused engagement with students and families starting in sixth grade and will continue through high school, college, and into their career and alumni experience. The application is built upon an IBM Blockchain Hyperledger Fabric framework.
Each organization can add to the blockchain (transactions such as grades and announcements) and access information on the blockchain if they have the correct permissions to do so. The permission is the private key that can decrypt the information in the block. Transactions can be assigned attributes so that students can see announcements that pertain to them.
Each user will have attributes. These attributes will specify what kind of resources/announcements will reach them. On the organization side, if they create a resource/announcement, they can then set the attributes they would like it to send to. For example, if a STEM career fair is happening soon, the Career Center will create an announcement with attributes such as “STEM”, “Grades 13-16”, “Job Searching”, etc. Then, when this announcement is sent, students who match those attributes will receive it. This will help students get tailored information and resources that can help them in their academic journey.
Users and organizations interact with the blockchain indirectly. When a user or organization wants to query or add to the blockchain, they will interact with the web application. The web application will gather all the information from the user/organization and send a request to the NodeJS server. The server then connects with the IBM Blockchain Platform to interact with the Hyperledger Fabric environment/blockchain.
Our project will serve as a critical foundation for future work. Next year’s team can pick up where we left off to research the abundance of remaining questions. They can also choose to expand our prototype or explore alternative solutions using the information in our documentation. Either way, our documentation and prototype provide a first step into the development of Impact Studio’s Pathways to OSU Backbone Blockchain initiative.
