Blockcerts: a real blockchain solution for education.
At a job interview, do you get asked:
What is the title of your degree? or..
On which field do you have knowledge or experience? And how can you certify that?
Blockchain has become one of the most prominent tech and business’ buzzwords of the past years. Companies that have little to nothing to do with technology have skyrocketed their stock value by just adding blockchain to their name. Long Island Iced Tea Corp is one of the leading examples of this phenomenon, in 2017 change the name to Long Blockchain Corp, this caused their stock to go up by $70 million and stabilize at around some months later $35 million.
The truth is that the blockchain technology is far from achieving its full potential, with high volatility on the cryptocurrencies market, is easy to get distracted from the blockchain solutions that we can implement now.
Since a lot of the blockchain applications focus on financial, logistics or even advertisement, education is one of those fields that is often ignored by the Blockchain community; This does not mean that there is no value for the education field.
Blockcerts is an open standard for creating, issuing, viewing, and verifying blockchain-based certificates. These are certificates that live inside a blockchain, and that provides easy access to the trusted parties.
The Learning Machine Technologies group of the MIT Media Lab, developed the Blockcerts in 2016, in that same year they published it under the MIT open source license. It is a free system available for any institution, company or individual to use it to create their applications to issue and verify certifications in the blockchain.
What if LinkedIn integrated Blockcerts? Opinion
If LinkedIn incorporated certificates of this nature, the platform would give more credibility to the profiles that have listed different degrees from universities, academies, and independent institutions. Universities and other educational institutions will have to start issuing digital certificates. On which platform would this be? That is unknown, but it could indeed be the future of education and Blockcerts is one step closer to this reality.
One of the problems in education today is: how to document the achievements of individuals. Both the field of formal education and the area of informal learning share this issue. How can we produce certificates that lasts over time and that are portable, and more importantly, that are easily verifiable with a high degree of confidence?
Certifications could open possibilities for new financing models for students that excel and/or have financially limited to access to higher education. Better certifications would be great, but the value of education is on the skills it generates and how they translate into a professional environment. Durable and verifiable certificates over time are essential if education should facilitate the employability and mobility opportunities of the individuals in their communities and internationally.
Blockcerts is just an open standard, without initiatives around real solutions, there is no value. The good news is that there are already several initiatives to generate this type of certificates that have emerged recently, from the Comprehensive Student Records to the movement of badges in open (Open Badges) happening through the digital portfolios.
What is the future of degrees?
Faster and better certification could also change how people approach education. Micro or nano degrees are highly on demand; these are often filling a knowledge gap in traditional education between the current industries. The content in traditional universities could be excessively focused on theories and methods, often leaving students with no exposure to innovating practices and tools.
If you were able to build your degree with the knowledge you want to gain, would you do it?
What if you never decided between math and theater? What if you honestly did not need those art classes? (although you probably did). Having certifications with international or national standards could change how you approach your education. Perhaps you will be going to Harvard to study a field on business and then decide to learn data science at MIT. You would then have certification that you studied a specific domain of business and the same for data science. If you believe this will not be as relevant as a good ol’ degree, go back to the question at the beginning of the article.
The truth is that traditional education is becoming rapidly obsolete, even at the highest-ranking schools, is not fair to include all of them but it is not hard to see the gap between what jobs demand and what college students learn. In the end, it would be up to these institutions to approach certificates and education differently. Providing flexible education, that is relevant to the individual, and that contribute to the advancement of their professional careers.
