By Matheus Darós Pagani
CEO of 4CADIA Foundation
All across the globe, the information age made possible possibilities in the field of education that were then unheard-of. The number of self-learned people rises proportionally to the level and the quantity of information available on the Web. Some people even think that traditional institutions of education will soon be things of the past — and this expectation is getting closer to become reality every day.
However, this environment of flexible learning doesn’t overcome the problem of the lack of formal education of millions of people around the world. In contexts where there’s an asymmetry of information, it is just not possible, in many cases, simply saying that someone knows something without an actual test or a reliable representative of formal education to certify that claim, or at least a an onerous structure of tests and examinations to attest in fact this knowledge.
This problem might seem to be of little importance to professionals well located in the market, whose reputation acts like an instrument of governance to the corporate world; to others, however, it is a serious obstruction.
Individuals that emigrate to other countries might have difficulties to prove that they are actually competent to perform the job they claim to be capable of. The impossibility to excel at the stage of proof of certificates in many job selections have affect immigrants and refugees in many parts of the world. It has affected especially low-income individuals who need professional allocation.
Since most certifications are done through the printing of documents or unprotected electronic certificates, these types of certification can easily be lost or subjected to forgeries. This problem gets even worse as time passes, since institutions or archives can simply cease to exist due to financial crises, reckless chairmen, mismanagement, bad handling of files, wars, and natural catastrophes.
Fortunately, many dilemmas that demand the action of representatives or intermediates, it is possible to develop an app in blockchain to circumvent the risks, reduce costs, increase safety, and guarantee the transparency of transactions. In matters of educational certification, things aren’t different.
Blockchain apps can provide an identification service that can work as a credential passport in teaching institutions. It is a useful and safe tool, globally accessible and forgery-proof. This type of certificate ranges from great universities and teaching institutions to smaller centers of educations; from supplementary schools where students go to take courses to the university where he or she might get their PhD.
Such a tool can be made with a relatively simple structure, such as an app controlled by organizations or management systems (for instance, the central government of a given country). In this structure, the certifier grants the admission of new institutions to this decentralized system, that can add or validate credentials to the DLT. The aggregate of data generated then receives a digital signature by the certifying institution that is then publicly available. This kind of app can make it possible that a potential employer might verify, through a QR code that matches his ledger such informations as what, who, when the certification and to whom it was given.
On the level of more complex apps, it is possible that new systems might soon replace existing tools such as, for instance, LinkedIn. An example happened, in 2018, when the Indorse platform was proposed. These new tools can be paralleled to the efforts of international rationalization of educational systems, like the Bologna Process, in the European Union.
Of course, all this depends on lots of investment, public awareness, and the participation of institutions. Many of them have invested already in certifying systems available on apps developed in DLT. The ripest initiatives today might be found in the partnership between the MIT Media Lab and Learning Machine, not to mention the Fraunhofer FIT Blockchain Lab.
Governments and teaching institutions are the main characters of this change. Those who do not take heed of the potential of blockchain in this area is going to be left behind, sooner or later.
