How Blockchain Will Come To Campus Posted on : Sep 18 - 2018

Blockchain, the decentralized, secure information technology, is most often associated with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. But almost from the outset, encouraging and entertaining uses have been under consideration and development.

But in education, uses for blockchain have been slow to develop, even conceptualize. That may be because education leaders and institutions have developed a reputation as slow adapters to technology, a reputation that’s probably earned in some cases. It may also be because, even though teaching may be becoming less human, learning still entirely is. Another explanation may be that education is about liberally sharing information. For the most part, knowledge is not something we safeguard.

Nonetheless, blockchain is probably coming to campus. More accurately, it’s coming after campus.

While the Groningen Declaration sounds like something economists throw jello over at the Nobel Prize cafeteria, or maybe the next Bourne sequel, it’s actually an agreement to work toward creating easily accessible, highly transportable and secure education credentials.

The idea rests on four pillars.

The first is that accessing transcripts, the existing records of academic achievement, is labor intensive and takes time. The second is that a transcript has limited information, usually only a course title and a grade. Third, with personal and population mobility, accessing academic records with common standards, any time and in any place will be essential. And finally, there’s an assumption that, going forward, learning won’t end when you graduate high school or college, it will be a life-long endeavor of upgrading job skills and staying current with evolving technology.

For that last purpose, ongoing education is likely to cross institutions, geography and significant amounts of time. If, for example, three years ago you paid for, went to, and completed a program in computer coding at Dev Bootcamp, which closed in 2017, showing that accomplishment to an employer or future education provider could be a challenge.

So, the theory is, future education credentials will need to hold more information, be accessible by many people while being both secure and verifiable – things that seem well suited for a blockchain-type solution.

So far, nearly 100 schools and education organizations around the world, including about 40 in the United States, have signed on to Groningen. American signers include Duke, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and the University of Texas, Austin.

Earlier this year, the Groningen conference in Paris featured multiple presentations specifically on blockchain. One presentation was by “Blockchain in Education” – a group assembled at the University of Groningen to run an ongoing pilot with 20 international college students using blockchain to access and verify their credentials. MIT (MIT Media Lab) has already developed mobile credential storage app called Blockcerts and used it, in 2017, to issue blockchain-secure digital diplomas to graduates of some of their programs. And one college, the University of Nicosia (UNIC) in Cyprus, is already offering full blockchain credentials for all their programs. View More