Why Blockchain Could Fix Education
With blockchain comes transparency and alignment of effort to reward. Maybe this is what education needs.
As human beings, we do not live long enough to accumulate all the world’s knowledge in one person, entity or place. Since the beginning of time, knowledge has been passed from one individual to another. With the strength of collaboration within our species, we have been able to survive and progress by learning from and improving on the earlier generations. The boom of developments in technology in the recent centuries have had dramatic impact on the way humanity dispenses and receives knowledge. From the invention of fire, then the printing press in the 15th century, chalkboard and teaching materials in the 19th century and to recent developments like radios and TVs, none has had a more dramatic impact than the 20th century’s invention, the Internet.
The maturity of search engines like Google and online encyclopedias like Wikipedia have made access to knowledge and the world truly flat.
By making information public and equally available worldwide, the effect of the Internet on the way we learn can not be understated. The maturity of search engines like Google and online encyclopedias like Wikipedia have made access to knowledge and the world truly flat. Another recent development — blockchains — promises to take this to another level.
The general premise of a blockchain is to have two or more parties that have no trustworthy central authority to interact with each other by recording their dealings in a transparent database that every one can have a copy of. Each record added is verified, timestamped and cryptographically signed to a point that it can not be changed or faked. At first glance, application of such technology to a sector bent on tradition, reputation and trust between the giver and receiver of knowledge seems to be misplaced. Who could doubt the trust an apprentice has in their master? or a revered university’s certificate of diploma? This is the way things have always been working; the reputation and implied trust that holds the education ecosystem together.
What went wrong from the days of Picasso and Isaac Newton? May be the better question to ask is, can it be fixed?
However, recent developments in the world economy and society have shaken these assumptions to the core. No longer is there a secure job, most jobs are now going to gig-economies and you can not rely on your company job for the next 10–20 years of your life. Students, teachers and working learners alike have had to invent and re-invent themselves. Education institutions have become more donor focused and commercialized, with the value of education not matching the student loans taken out to pay for it. This is all while the teacher pay is not going anywhere upwards. That has led to teacher strikes in nearly every neighbourhood school to become more frequent. As if that is not enough, work is increasingly becoming more mobile. People have to move more for work from one state or country to another. In most cases, education credentials are hard to prove or increasingly irrelevant and re-training or re-learning has caused a lot of financial stress, loss of time and work. This has led to the raise of fake/fluff credentials, puffed up CV jobs and skills and half-baked graduates to meet graduation quotas with teachers cheating for their students in public schools to avoid loosing their jobs! Abomination you say? What went wrong from the days of Picasso and Isaac Newton? May be the better question to ask is, can it be fixed? A lot of attempts have been made but the issues persist. May be it is time to give this new blockchain technology a chance.
Well, how would a blockchain make a difference? Let’s imagine an ideal world, where politics, national boundaries and institutions do not hold hostage to knowledge. It turns out that, if properly applied, blockchains could be the answer to many of the burning problems plaguing education in the world as we know it. Now, let us examine some situations where this may be the case.
..from a high school transfer to a degree certificate of an immigrant, application of blockchain is a problem that would require atomizing and verifying knowledge acquired and storing it in a standardized open format.
Transferability of education achievements has always been a tough problem. Pythagoras theorem is the same whether you are in a makeshift school in Zimbabwe or a private school in New York. It should not matter where you learned it but whether you know it and can apply it. But alas, education does not work this way. There is no objective proof of the quality of education. So education institutions do not trust and can not gauge another institution’s certifications. This means, from a high school transfer to a degree certificate of an immigrant, application of blockchain is a problem that would require atomizing and verifying knowledge acquired and storing it in a standardized open format. Whether it is from a traditional education institution like MIT, an online system like Khan Academy, LiveEdu.tv or your high school tutor, breaking down knowledge into globally recognized units and test checks for learning would make the source of your education not to matter. The only thing that will matter would be the immutable proof of acquisition of said knowledge — something that a record of the fact on a blockchain would easily achieve.
Eventually, proving diploma certificates, PhD work done, student effort, teacher effort, grades origin and many others would become obvious. This also has economic implications for teachers as they could then begin to earn commensurate to their effort and actual student results and even, I dare say, earn more from gig economies with such work becoming more relevant in this approach to education. For companies, it becomes easier to prove, train and track progress of their employees as job and company requirements evolve. For home schooling, the student would finally be able to show that they are actually learning, at their own pace and environment while their more traditional counterparts would finally receive true value for their money. Even further, education would finally be standardized worldwide. The possibilities are endless.
On the knowledge generation side and in today’s digitized world, ownership and earning from research is hard. Material can easily be shared, copied and modified leading to a raise in Intellectual Property theft and false actors faking ownership of research work. With blockchain technology, researchers and artists alike at a university or business can prove originality, effort and ownership and actually earn from their hard work and skills for every usage of their work, if they so desire. The side-effect could be the collapse of politicized patent issuances that are now turning into more of a propaganda weapon for governments instead of a record of true innovation breakthroughs. It would thus put true innovation back in the driving seat of change and progress.
Many institutions survive on their network and reputation and hence making that a non-factor in their reason for survival will be taken as a threat.
After all is said about the marvels of blockchain and its applications in education, the fact still stands - education systems around the world are slow and resistant to change. Many institutions survive on their network and reputation and hence making that a non-factor in their reason for survival will be taken as a threat. It remains to be seen where change will come from. The good news is that some cracks in the resistance to blockchain in education have began to form, from MIT using Blockcerts to offer digital diplomas to instant verification of academic records by the University of London using Gradbase, we are starting to see a reversal in mindset towards this disrupting new technology. However, ultimately, I believe the biggest change will come from the most motivated stakeholders of the whole ecosystem; the students. With grassroots student-organized movements like BEN (Blockchain Education Network), we may be witnessing a tectonic power shift to take education back to its roots — the relationship of the student and the teacher — thanks to blockchain.
The author is the founder of TechFaithful and a Fintech startup still in stealth mode. He can be reached on @azziwa on any social media.
