Decentralizing Higher Education with Blockchain

The last decade has seen significant advancements in technology, such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Mobile Devices. Most recently, there has been substantial interest paid to the emergence of blockchain technologies. While blockchain has already been rapidly adopted into FinTech, as with crypto currencies, other industries are moving at a slower pace. Education is one area where blockchain has been quietly investigated and where some have already started its implementation. Institutions in the European Union (EU) lead in this through the use of blockchain based systems for credentialing. EU institutions are also investigating utilizing blockchain implementations for the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). Several institutions in North America are also making progress with research funding being utilized to understand the technology and potential use cases.

At many institutions, adoption has been slow, or outright rejected, due to concerns about the applicability, scalability, and energy usage of blockchain systems. While blockchain developers address scalability and energy usage, it is up to institutional decision makers to determine its applicability. Like with any technology there are benefits, and while blockchain is garnering excitement, it may not be the ideal technology for certain use cases. Within education there are obvious concerns about data privacy, while still allowing sharing of data. These concerns have greatly impacted the ability for ideal use cases of blockchain systems to be developed within traditional institutions.

Blockchain garners excitement for its ability to disrupt traditional industries and processes but to do that necessitates disintermediating centralized institutions. A barrier to disintermediation that existed early in this decade was execution of procedures performed within institutions whether through manual or automated means. Some blockchain implementations, like Ethereum, were designed to address this problem through a capability called smart contracts. Smart contracts allow small software programs to be triggered and executed on the blockchain with output results and data being stored on the blockchain as well.

One of the early use cases for smart contracts was to enable Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) to be placed onto the blockchain and then run automatically. To date, most DAOs have focused on financial products and have allowed for voting on disbursement of funds provided by multiple parties. The financial DAOs have proven that processes and procedures, normally within an institution or several large institutions, could be formalized into smart contracts while providing the same outcomes with greater efficiency, transparency, and accountability. With smart contracts, it is possible to abstract processes in an organization where entities interact.

Within education institutions, there are many points of interaction between entities. In particular, there are many instances of one or more entities evaluating another entity. It may be evaluation of a completed assessment, the quality and relevance of the assessment itself, the quality of teaching material, a teaching plan, whether a program fulfills department outcomes, and so forth. The process of evaluation and the chain of evaluations ultimately lends credibility to the credential that the student earns. Each evaluation can be considered a transfer of value and each evaluating entity can impart value to the entity being evaluated. This abstraction and the procedural logic can be formalized with smart contracts and tokenization of digital assets or digital representations of assets.

The process of tokenization opens up the opportunity for many entities to participate in the process of creation, evaluation, and granting of credentials. Students could select course tokens and learn from content providers that create learning material aligned to those course tokens. Content evaluators would evaluate the learning materials to ensure that it is valid and applicable prior to certifying that material. Assessment creators can create assessments that would grant tokens upon successful completion. Once again, evaluators would need to validate the assessments and allow them to grant course tokens. There would also be program creators and validators with the entire governance process for program and course creation implemented as a smart contract. With all of this on a public blockchain, it is reasonable to see how many different entities would be able to interact in a decentralized manner.

This session will provide an overview of blockchain, how traditional institutional roles translate into smart contracts, and how current online platforms can integrate into a decentralized education network. Conversation will be encouraged, particularly around transparency and accountability, barriers to adoption, security and data privacy concerns, and small scale intra-institutional implementations. Opportunities will be provided for exploring questions and concerns relating to the adoption of blockchain technologies within higher education.