To NFT or not to NFT in Academia?
In april 2022 we held a talk on the application of NFTs in higher education and career development at a conference, co-hosted by the National Student House under the leadership of our Research Lead and Co-Founder — Hristian Daskalov.
Here are some of the key insights Hristian had to share after the event:
As a person, researching and occasionally piloting the use of distributed open technologies in Academia since 2015 (check out Open Source University on LinkedIn!), I was not sure if the topic will be of practical use to the audience, which was more into proven best practices sharing.
As my expectations were, only under 5% of the university career consultancy practitioners attending from around Bulgaria had heard of this Web3.0 use case and noone was really looking into how NFTs can be of practical use to their universities — their academic and student communities.
I am thankful to Rosen Petkov for the invitation to share my thoughts and for his encouragement to do so, despite my initial concerns.
Rosen kindly reminded me that sharing universally accepted truths and/or sharing insights among people who would perceive them as well known facts would be of far lesser value to both parties.
In retrospect, it’s clear that although my talk has most probably been doomed to be met with general skepticism, sparkling curiosity into a single attendee is what matters (and the number was proven to be greater than that).
We should never forget that planting the seed of curiosity and experimentation — successful or not, is what matters most to innovation-led progress.
I will be happy to keep in touch with all the subject matter experts I met at the conference and contribute to any potential innovative endeavours in the field, which we can wrap our heads around.
Hristian was kind enough to present to the audience and to review critically some of the most promissing ‘NFT in Academia’ use cases.
Due to the lack of conference streaming, we unfortunately do not have a recording of the talk for us to share with the audience of this blog.
Insterad, we orchestrated a list of publicly available articles on the subject that can get you up-to-speed with what’s going on in the ecosystem:
“NFTs and Higher Education: Part 1 & 2“
- https://nonfungible.com/news/opinions/nfts-and-higher-education-part-1
- https://nonfungible.com/news/opinions/nft-higher-education-part-2
“We Wondered If NFTs Could Change Education, So We Decided to Sell This Article on the Blockchain”
“South Korean university will issue NFT degrees to all 2830 graduates”
“School certificates for the digital age”
“First-ever auction of NFT based on Nobel Prize nets UC Berkeley $50,000”
“Education NFT’s pilot app — by Prof. Beau Brannan
We hope these materials are exciting enough to get you into exploration mood. Because as
concluded in his talk — “We should never forget that planting the seed of curiosity and experimentation — successful or not, is what matters most to innovation-led progress”.When it comes to OSU’s own progression in the field, our 2022 software update is on its way and we will be happy to demonstrate first hand how the Open Source University platform enables learners to register their certificates and diplomas on ‘the blockchain’ in the form of non-fungible tokens.
This time around, Layer 2 integration will also be present in order to tackle known scalability issues with Etherium. When it comes to tackling those issues, we’ve indeed come a long way over the past 12 months!
Our major accomplishment in the area is most probably the yet-to-be-announced opportunity to create your own Open Source University ‘fork’ (to deploy a customizable cloud instance in less than 90 seconds) and to manage it according to your own learning needs and educational goals.
This innovation will enable our partners to experiment further in the field of open education, including in the direction of building ‘Metaversities’, i.e. to virtualize entire universities and colleges by harnessing the power of NFTs among other things.
Interested to lear more? — follow us here or reach out at hello@os.university.
