Centralized Education Will Rule Until Credentials are Decentralized

The Missing Factor in Online Learning

Online learning, it was supposed to be the future. MOOCs would disrupt the educational order, but they didn’t, why? The mainstream conclusion is that nothing can replace the magic and motivational factor of campus life. Silicon valley and the internet was no match for the ancient, timeless institutions of higher education. I reject this conclusion.

We mistook the motivational factor of a credential, for the motivational factor of campus life. We saw 4% completion rates of MOOCs and assumed the campus was the crucial missing element, not the credential. In turn we abandoned the pursuit of lower marginal cost credentials. Now lost is the notion of reducing that high marginal cost, which is assumed inevitable and continues to go unquesitoned. The fight to subsidize high cost education/credentials for a few continues, the fight for low cost education/credentials for the many has slowed.

Decentralizing education was always going to be easy, decentralizing credentials was always going to be hard. Centralized education will rule until credentials are decentalized.

Decentralizing credentials isn’t going to be a VC funded effort – it is a incredibly hard technical hurdle, an unsolved computer science problem. When it is finally solved it won’t be proprietary, it’ll be necessarily open and decentralized. In the same way electronic cash was not possible until the blockchain solved the double spend problem, digital credentials won’t be possible until a ‘proof of actor’ problem is solved.

How do we prove someone performed a set of actions, so they can be measured and turned into a credential that can be trusted at scale? How can we do this without physical trusted third parties and all the baggage that comes with them? How can we create a system that is cheat proof enough to be trusted at scale?