How Blockchain can benefit Higher Education
Written by Julie Chavanu
Blockchain technology, and it’s first product application Bitcoin, arrived on the world scene in 2009. Initially, many considered cryptocurrency to be blockchain’s only real application. However, it has evolved significantly in a truly short period of time and blockchain’s real value for many industries is only just emerging.
One industry in which blockchain has made some inroads and an industry that has seen major upheaval with recent world events, is higher education. Even prior to 2020, higher education was experiencing significant shifts, from the rapid growth of online coursework to the expansion of graduate certificates to overall declines in enrollments. If approached with an open mind, blockchain could prove to be a boon for these institutions as changes in the education environment continue.
Blockchain’s appeal for higher education, and many industries, is multi-faceted and includes lowered costs, reduced processing time and increased overall information security.
Blockchain has already been adopted by a small percent of institutions for student record-keeping and credentialing and its use here may be its first widely used application. Blockchain offers a secure way to collect, store and share students’ records, and for the records to be the property of the student instead of the institution. Today’s reality is that people learn in many ways and from many organizations and blockchain allows for the records of degrees, certificates and other credentialling to be kept in one secure e-portfolio. It becomes a collection of a person’s life-long learning experiences that is easily sharable, but also secure.
Blockchain can also benefit higher education by making resource-sharing across a variety of institutions viable. As the costs to run higher education institutions rapidly increase and in turn, the costs to states and students, being able to more easily and securely share information and resources across a university system (or even between university systems) can grow the value institutions provide to their students and cut some operating costs in the process.
As the sharing of information between higher education institutions becomes more important and as the way that information is shared evolves, researchers, faculty members and others will want to ensure their intellectual property rights are protected. At the very heart of blockchain technology is security and at the same time greater freedom in how information is shared. By creating content repositories or ‘blockchain libraries’, records transfers are easy and well-tracked so that the appropriate people get the appropriate recognition and associated rewards when their projects are cited and used.
Lastly, as this technology expands and more uses for it are found, companies will have a greater demand for employees who can use it effectively. Higher education will need new education programs that help students learn about the technology. There is such a cross-section of areas that applications of blockchain affect, from business to technology to law to policy to cryptography, that creating new programs is another new and exciting challenge for universities.
What’s it mean?
- Blockchain is certainly here to stay and is so new that we have just begun to explore its applications.
- Blockchain is promising for customers (yes, customers) because they can get education in the chunks they want, when and from where they want them based on their own career needs and interests (personalization).
- Blockchain benefits institutions because it broadens the way they can offer their very valuable services, which broadens who they can feasibly and relevantly serve.