Blockchain Can Disrupt Higher Education Today, Global Labor Market Tomorrow

In the post-pandemic world, individuals will need to seize ownership and control of their educational credentials — documents like degrees and transcripts — from schools, universities and governments. That notion received key support last week from the American Council on Education in a study funded by the United States Department of Education focusing on the use of blockchain in higher education.

“Blockchain, in particular, holds promise to create more efficient, durable connections between education and work,” wrote Ted Mitchell, the president of ACE, in the foreword to the study published on June 8, adding: “In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, learners will be more mobile, moving in and out of formal education as their job, health, and family situations change.”

A key theme of the report is personal data agency — i.e., how “distributed ledger technologies [DLT] can ‘democratize’ data and empower individuals with agency over their personal information.” The report noted:

Education credentials have been typically stored on centralized systems. The problem with this, explained the report, is that data can be changed, deleted and shared without consent or knowledge of the individuals who created that data. By comparison, blockchain technologies “are inherently more transparent, persistent, immutable, and secured by encryption,” noted the report. 

Kim Hamilton Duffy, an architect for the Digital Credentials Consortium, told Cointelegraph that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the demand for digital credentials, adding: “Because of that and existing educational blockchain-related pilots, I expect these credentials will be commonplace over the next 2–3 years.”

A promising end-to-end pilot program demonstrating learner-controlled digital diplomas and degrees on a blockchain will run later in 2020, and a second will demonstrate digital transcripts, she said. Current pilots involve both permissioned blockchains — with credentials stored directly on the chain — as well as public blockchains with credentials stored off-chain that make use of blockchain-anchored identity registries.

One interesting detail: The decentralized identifiers/verifiable credentials architecture used in some of the most recent projects was designed with no privileged roles, Christopher Allen, the principal architect of Blockchain Commons — an open infrastructure corporation — told Cointelegraph, which means that anyone can be an issuer, adding: 

For example, Allen could personally make a verifiable claim that “Kim has a mastery level of competence in leading international level technical standards processes,” which is something that no educational institution would be willing to claim, but given Allen’s history and reputation as a co-author of the successful SSL/TLS specification, that attestation would arguably convey important information to Kim’s future employers, clients and collaborators. “These types of claims, I believe, will be an important part of the future of educational credentials,” Allen, who’s also a former co-chair of W3C Credentials CG, told Cointelegraph. 

Meanwhile, the current system is untenable in the view of many. Fraudulent diplomas abound, Hans Pongratz, the chief information officer at the Technical University of Munich, told Cointelegraph: “There are diploma mills and online shops around […] — you can even select the right paper thickness and seals.” Roman Beck, a professor at IT University of Copenhagen, told Cointelegraph that the diploma system is “failure-prone and subject to all kinds of fraud,” clarifying further: 

Recently, through the standardization of verifiable credentials and in-progress pilots involving the T3 innovation network (U.S.-led), European Digital Credentialing Initiative (E.U.-led) and OpenCerts (Singapore), “we are reaching better E2E demonstrations of fitness,” Duffy added. 

But there are still obstacles to overcome, some technical.