Blockchain Education: Universities, Programs, Courses

Where and how you can study blockchain.

How do you land a dream job? Usually you do your best and try to be in the right place at the right time. If the job is intellectually demanding, most of the times it requires for you to have a University degree.

Today, the FinTech industry, and blockchain in particular, offers one of the most lucrative careers on the job market — a reasonable incentive for students to expect this kind of course to be included in their curriculum. But this isn’t the only reason more and more blockchain courses are becoming available at universities — there is a rapidly growing demand for qualified blockchain specialists in IT companies all over the world.

Last year, Coinbase conducted a study of 50 leading universities to see if they offer blockchain courses. It turns out that 42% have included at least one blockchain or crypto-related class in their fall semester curriculums — and 20% had more than one class. Note that this study focused on the courses available for undergraduate students. Imagine how much higher the percentage would have been without this limitation. Moreover, as Coinbase further puts it, “Expanding the results to include longstanding foundational classes on cryptography, 70 percent of universities offer at least one crypto-related class.”

Let’s take a closer look at the opportunities these universities have to offer.

Clubs and Initiatives

“Crypto-related” does not necessarily mean finance or IT. Social sciences acknowledge the impact blockchain has on the economy and society, that’s why new courses are being introduced and scholars form research groups to analyze this influence. There are on-campus and online courses on societal consequences of employing blockchain and a several research institutes with dozens of articles and books written on the subject, with conferences, meetings, and magical atmosphere of being among the like-minded friends and colleagues.

One of them is the Institute of Blockchain Studies. Its founder wrote an influential book on blockchain that is considered a must-read in the community — “Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy” by Melanie Swan. She has given numerous talks on philosophical implications of new technology and collaborates with other academics to provide readers with multifaceted views on blockchain. This is an independent non-profit online research institute and journal.

Luckily, university initiatives have various organizations to rely upon if they want to create a blockchain center at their facilities and establish connections between their students and the industry. One of them is BEN — Blockchain Education Network. It connects a web of more than 40 student blockchain clubs all over the world and it is mainly supported by generous donations of sympathetic people and partnerships with interested organizations.

Here you can take a glance at those clubs which are founded at the top 5 universities (according to the most recent ranking).

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has Digital Currency Initiative. It strives to unite crypto enthusiasts in- and outside of the university to conduct research both in blockchain technology and its business and societal applications. This is a powerful research group that produces high-quality articles and papers, gives interesting talks on the scope of what crypto can encompass and hosts a podcast on technology, society and ethics.

2. Harvard University has a Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Club that seems to be more business-oriented that MIT’s Initiative. According to their website, they frequently invite cryptocurrency specialists from the industry to teach students about the current trends in tech companies and to give workshops on crypto startups.

3. The Stanford Center for Blockchain Research is more technology-oriented. It conducts research in cyber security and software engineering but it also invites researchers from economic and legal backgrounds.

4. At Oxford University, there are two blockchain initiatives — one is the institutional University College Oxford Blockchain Research Center and another is the student initiative Oxford Blockchain Network.

5. Students at California Institute of Technology created their Caltech Blockchain Club about a year ago. With a strong focus on cryptoeconomics, is interested in the research and adoption of the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The club makes its mission to “serve as a liaison” between the students and the DLT companies.

Courses at leading universities

Most of the top 50 universities offer online or on-campus courses on blockchain. Among the Ivy League universities, Harvard offers a 5-months introductory course called “Introduction to Blockchain and Bitcoin” which costs $2,750 and starts at the end of January. Its description announces that it will revisit critical economic questions and teach you how to build a DApp as well as introduce you to the basics of cryptography. Although this seems like a high price to pay for an introductory course that you might think you can find online for free, it is in fact comparably low and well thought-through.

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a course “Blockchain Technologies: Business Innovation and Application” for $3,500. It takes only 6 weeks, as opposed to 5 months in the previous case. This is not an introduction, however, and it is supposed to give you an understanding of blockchain’s “longer-term implications for business and its relationship with other emerging technologies, including AI and IoT”.

2. Stanford’s on-campus course “Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies” is part Stanford School of Engineering curriculum and ends with a Cyber Security Graduate Certificate. This course investigates technological solutions in cyber security and covers such topics, as Bitcoin transactions, elliptic curves, hash functions and other software engineering subjects.

3. In 2016, the Berkeley Bitcoin Association introduced a course “Blockchain Fundamentals” into their undergraduate program. After a tremendous success of this program, they decided to collaborate with an online learning platform edX to launch it online. Now edX offers two Berkeley courses in this program for $178.20 — “Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies” and “Blockchain technology”.

4. Oxford provides a variety of courses on blockchain at different faculties. Oxford Blockchain Strategy Programme, for example, helps entrepreneurs better understand blockchain technology and teaches them how to create business models for this sector. Another course at Oxford offers technological expertise in blockchain. It is called “Blockchain Software Engineering” and it focuses on how to install, deploy and operate blockchain networks, how to identify potential use cases, operate in Hyperledger Composer and more.

While clubs are accessible only to students of the respective universities, most courses (even those provided by the institutes) are open for anyone to register, especially on online platforms, such as Udemy, Coursera, or edX.

Pioneers in any field create their own rules for the know-hows they invent. Whether we take technology or philosophy, the founding fathers did not have textbooks prepared for them. Only after a certain stage of development, improving a technology and making a breakthrough demands relying on a well-established knowledge base. That is why universities are good knowledge accelerators when it comes to mature disciplines. But blockchain does not seem to be grown-up yet, let alone mature. We are still very close to the pioneers who have the luxury of laying the groundwork , meaning that you can still greatly influence the course blockchain will take in the future.

What you can start with is reading up on the available materials, subscribing to blockchain projects’ blogs on Medium, YouTube and other platforms, search for a course online, or for a class at your university, join a community on campus, or create a community yourself! You can be certain that there are enough people around who would be interested in joining your initiative. And last but not least — you can get first-hand experience working as an intern or as a programmer/tester/writer/community manager/etc part-time in one of the blockchain projects. This way you can profit both from learning a lot very fast and from earning a living. You will be paid to study at your job because working in blockchain means constant hands-on learning. At Array.IO, we constantly seek to share our experience and knowledge with others and learn from our colleagues all over the world. Our mission is to craft a better future for the blockchain industry. Stay tuned or contact us if you share our values!