Transforming The Education Sector Using Blockchain

Education hasn’t changed much in the previous decades, although the channels through which knowledge has been shared and accessed have changed significantly. Blockchain and AI together might just be the disruptive wave of change within the education sector. Since blockchain removes the need for centralized verification of certificates, eases how identities are verified and many other applications. You can find more such ways in which blockchain can disrupt the education sector in this article.

There are lots of blockchain education companies out there. Every company isn’t entering the same space, there are different niche markets everyone is trying to enter into. But the first question is why do we need Blockchain in education?

There are a variety of markets blockchain education companies are working in, so let’s dive into different categories of the education market and companies associated with them.

“When you take technology and mix it with art, you always come up with something innovative.”

Decentralized Education Marketplace

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Decentralized Marketplaces help to validate the quality of courses being offered, facilitate payments and provide immutable certificates of completion. Blockchain technology is further used to incentivize and reward learning, and to track different achievements. Companies offering this type of services usually provide courses and micro lessons.

• ODEM: It is a decentralized marketplace that offers students an affordable learning opportunity. Using blockchain, the company connects educators, students and professionals to relevant courses and resources.
• BitDegree: It is a blockchain-powered education marketplace which offers online courses, with academic performance and achievements tracked on a blockchain ledger.

Digital Certifications of Learning and Skills

Blockchain can be used to verify your certifications and keep them on the ledger so they are never lost. This can solve a major problem of people losing their certificates as well as institutions taking weeks for providing with certificates, and diploma degrees. Following are some organizations working to solve these issues:

• Blockcerts: It is an open standard for creating, issuing, viewing, and verifying blockchain-based certificates. Their goal is to enable an individual to possess and share their official records. The records provided by them are shareable as well as tamper-proof.
• Disciplina: They are trying to create a universal blockchain that can hold verified personal profiles based on academic and professional achievements. And offering an effective algorithm for candidate search by fields of expertise.

Peer To Peer Learning

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This is the first model that was implemented in the education sector using blockchain, as it is the use case of blockchain where we remove the middleman and connect those with knowledge directly to those who need it, this vastly reduces the cost of education. Some organizations following this model are:

• Woolf, Blockchain-powered University: Woolf is a non-profit, democratic and a decentralized community for students and teachers. Woolf provides a chance to connect with professors for high-quality, personal education at an affordable cost. Woolf teaches through tutorials: every week, students meet with a professor, typically online through a video call.

Knowledge

These companies are focused on incentivizing people for their knowledge. Knowledge creators can be rewarded for input and community can rate the content.

• Knowledge.io: It is a platform to reward people for their knowledge, educators, employers, advocates and others can exchange knowledge through interactions. It makes it easy for third parties to target audience based on ratings generated from their online engagements.
• Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh is a knowledge-sharing social platform powered by Ethereum smart contracts and blockchain technology. The network shifts the way readers, critics, and authors communicate and connect. Gilgamesh aims to remove the middleman in the publishing industry and remove barriers to transfer and receive information.

Although there are many education platforms yet the major issue we are facing is related to the experience of a student, as well as finding a one-stop solution from learning, jobs, mentors and much more. We at Zubi are trying to solve this problem by providing an experience platform for learning, blockchain enabled certifications, finding a job, mentors, projects, earning, investing and much more in a gamified way so people can enjoy the process.