The future is never clear nor certain, but the more you know, the better you can guess. These industry insiders have studied the state of and trends related to blockchain in education, and they’ve used their findings to predict the future of blockchain in schools and universities. Here’s what they said:
1. Danielius Stasiulis, Co-founder of BitDegree
“Slow adoption growth with a massive bang in the later years. Pretty much like any other transformative trend. There will be an emergence of novel use cases, such as global credentialing systems that focus on underserved education players and learners.”
2. Miguel Caballero, CEO of Tutellus
“Education is the industry that less changed over the last centuries. We hold similar educational models than in the middle age: teachers and institutions versus students. Blockchain focuses on students, so it can change everything.”
“The future is here! It simply isn’t available to everyone yet. The reason records have had trouble making the leap into digital formats is that nobody has trusted digital security. This changes when we have a public blockchain that acts as a global notary to instantly verify records, across vendors and even across legal jurisdictions. That will lead to the eventual end of the Apostille process, new applicant management techniques in HR systems, and ultimately massive cost savings for schools, learners, and employers.”
“The future will be driven by students. In the United States, the cost of college will continue to soar. The return on investment has become less clear. Other countries do not face such a crisis, but the United States is home to the top universities in the world. As enrollment falls, cash-strapped universities will begin looking for other sources of revenue.
A blockchain based university would create a micro-education economy funded by students. As is with all blockchain based projects, the value is in the network. Blockchain in education through ownership of identity and credentials will allow those who are competent and knowledgeable to prove that regardless of geography.”
5. Ameer Rosic, Co-founder of Blockgeeks
“Open source, micro degree platforms, where teachers all around the world can crowdsource their salaries to teach students specific skills on demand.”
6. Richard Maaghul, Founder and CEO of ODEM
“The future of blockchain in education is a shift to student ownership. We now have a technology that supports the decentralization of organizational authority, shifting ownership to the parties who contribute to education, and more broadly to the economy; students, educators, employers and educational organizations.
We’re very excited to be partnering with organizations that understand this, seeing that with the implementation of blockchain, schools can better respond to students with better learning experiences.”
7. Hanady Al Ahmadieh, Project Lead and Co-founder of BlocRecs
“As more educational institutes adopt blockchain for credentials, each individual will own an identity wallet containing all their earned educational records. These records will be owned by the individual and can be easily shared with any third party.
As such, credentials can be made stackable through smart contracts. In other words, if an individual owns multiple micro-credentials that makes them eligible for a certificate, smart contracts can automatically allow this process to take place through blockchain.”
8. Dr. Lars Brünjes, Director of Education at IOHK
“Blockchain is a key technology that offers hope for billions of people who have been denied financial and other services that we in Europe and the US take for granted. It has the potential to allow developing countries to leapfrog decades of infrastructure development and finally unlock their tremendous potential. For this to happen, blockchain education has to be massively upscaled. Instead of training dozens or hundreds, we must teach
thousands or even hundreds of thousands. This is the only way to ensure that people who intimately understand the problems, namely, those who actually live in the countries in question, have been put into a position to engage these problems with confidence and solve them.”
9. Steven R. Gordon, Prof. of Information Technology Management, Babson College
“As blockchain technology matures and becomes more widely accepted, its applications will likely appear in a variety of operational contexts, such as human resources, accounting, institutional research, financial aid, and admissions. Credentialing and micro-credentialing, however, will likely be the first and most common applications, and the ones most uniquely tied to the process of education.”
10. Dr. Jennifer Jones Educational Entrepreneur and Founder of Green Ivy Schools
“Blockchain will be the defining system for all aspects of life, from finance to voting to health to education to work. There is no industry that won’t have a blockchain design. This is because digital natives see the world differently, interconnected, public, collaborative, distributed, with mutual accountability. And digital natives do not trust or respond to centralized authority. They live to disrupt centralized systems. This cultural attitude will manifest in blockchain or adjacent designs everywhere in everything.”
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Sam Mire
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