Blockchain and Education

Our entire life cycle – from birth, through kindergarten, school, finding a job, and into the golden years – is full of different documentations and data. Even in this day and age, almost everything we do leaves a paper trail. At school, you do tests, which are still mainly on paper, and at the end of the year, you’ll get a paper certificate proving that you have finished the year. I have 12 of them at home, as well as three diplomas, plus ten different certificates from courses I have taken over the years. Most of them live in my folder at home and no digital copies exist anywhere else.

In instances where your previous diploma is needed, such as applying for a job or going back to school to get a higher degree, might turn out to be a nightmare when you only have the original paper diploma. If you send your original documents and they get lost, they are lost forever. And if you need to get certified copy, this will take time to obtain.

Losing precious time is not the only problem you might face with paper degrees. Degree forging is becoming more and more attractive to many fraudsters. Pakistan based company Axact was exposed as a fraud, when a BBC investigation revealed that Axact sold almost 300,000 fake degrees worldwide, making over $89 million USD in the process.

In the search for replacing paper-based systems, the Education sector has started to look more closely at blockchain technology. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the European Commission’s Science and Knowledge Service put together an extensive report in 2017 about “Blockchain in Education“. The report introduced the concept of implementing blockchain technology in the education sector, analysing potential risks, values, prospects, and options for improving the current technological development and deployment. The report brings out several key findings and conclusions, including:
• Blockchain technology will accelerate the end of the paper-based systems for certificates, giving extra security for documents and other related records that would be stored on the blockchain.
• People can send their certificates to potential employers for reviewing without the need to contact the organisation that initially issued them. At the same time, this would remove the need for educational organisations to validate credentials.
• A blockchain system gives people ownership and control over their own data and reduces educational organizations’ data management costs and their exposure to liability from data management issues.
• Blockchain will enable school payments in cryptocurrencies.
• All the information that can be in a digital form, like contracts, transactions or assets, can be put on the blockchain.
• All of the data added to the blockchain is permanent, searchable and transparent, making forging or deleting data impossible.

There are already several educational institutions that have been testing the abilities of blockchain technology through pilot projects, with some case studies below.

University of Nicosia

The Cyprus based university is the first higher educational institution to accept Bitcoin as a payment method. They started accepting Bitcoin in 2013, and by 2014, started teaching a university-level course on cryptocurrency, and are now offering an accredited degree program – a Master of Science in Digital Currency. They are committed to magnifying the potential of blockchain technology, and have implemented a fully functional library housed on the Bitcoin blockchain, where all of their students’ grades, diplomas, and certificates are being stored.

Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT)

In 2016, MIT Media Lab Learning Initiative partnered up with Learning Machine and created an incubation project called Blockcerts, an open-source ecosystem which is housed on the Bitcoin blockchain, and is used for creating, sharing, and verifying blockchain-based educational certificates that are cryptographically signed, making them tamper-proof. The mobile app makes it more convenient for students to generate keys, demonstrating their ownership of their documents.

Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) within the Open University UK

Open University is a leader in Learning Analytics in the UK. They are always looking for ways to improve the standards for certifications. Ethereum’s ecosystem with their decentralized platform has helped MKI to create smart contracts that will notarize all of their courses and add them to the blockchain. Open University uses its core Open Learn Platform and APPII platform to provide the service for their 170,000 students.

Changing the Education System

Although blockchain technology is still in its infancy, it has shown a lot of potential for disrupting and reforming the current education systems. In addition to the benefits that blockchain can bring to education systems mentioned above, it can also act as an Intellectual Currency. Bitcoin can be used for paying for products or services, and its micro-payment services can act as a reward system for use within educational services. Students who have done their assignments successfully could be rewarded, which could become part of a scholarship program.

Conclusion

The current systems we use are outdated and blockchain technology will bring us reliability and security with its decentralized nature, making sure that the data added to the blockchain stays there without interruptions or tampering. Hash-functions and cryptography add security, while smart contracts make processes more efficient by making it possible to automate most of the tasks, greatly reducing labour costs. Adding all of the students’ data to the blockchain will reduce degree fraud and give students control over their personal data.