The technology behind the digital currency Bitcoin could have an impact on the credentials of the future.
While that technology, known as the “blockchain,” is confusing even for geeks, some in higher education say it could help eliminate degree fraud and function as a more economical and efficient portfolio system for all digital credentials.
So what exactly is blockchain technology? Think about it as a digital, permanent public ledger that records everything anyone places on it. That means college degrees’ authenticity could be securely verified without assistance from a registrar’s office, says J. Philipp Schmidt, director of learning innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. “Nobody can ever tamper with them.”
About a year and a half ago, Mr. Schmidt and Juliana P. Nazaré, a graduate student and research assistant in the Media Lab, started studying how blockchain technology could resolve some of the shortcomings of digital credentials.
They wanted to find a way to recognize those who had completed workshops, online courses, and other courses at the lab. Digital certificates solved that problem, Mr. Schmidt says, but “at the time, there wasn’t an infrastructure to support the storage, exchange, and transfer of the certificates.”
That’s where the blockchain comes in. The researchers wanted to create a personalized online hub where they could store credentials coming from a variety of places and control how that information is shared. Moving from a paper system to the blockchain, Mr. Schmidt says, would make granting degrees cheaper, more transparent, and more secure.
The MIT researchers said they didn’t set out to develop software that would be marketable to colleges. But they are now working with Learning Machine, a company that builds application-tracking and admissions-system software, to market the credential technology to colleges and universities within the next six months or so.
In her research, Ms. Nazaré ran into a few thorny questions, including how to make the technology easy to use and who should own academic information.
“If you put it on a decentralized entity like the blockchain, you’re essentially the closest owner to that,” Ms. Nazaré says. “Whereas if it is living on a company’s server, they own that information.”
In addition, using the blockchain could make the idea of a permanent academic record literal. The way the blockchain works now, once something is added, it cannot be removed. Ever.
“Do we really want education records to be unalterable?” asks Audrey Watters, a critical voice on technology and education, in a recent article about the use of the blockchain in higher education. While the technology provides immediate verification of a record, it could make it hard for students to make a “fresh start,” she says.
Ms. Nazaré and Mr. Schmidt are continuing to explore changes in design to protect students’ privacy and give them greater control of their data on the blockchain.
Early Adopters
Some institutions are already moving toward using the blockchain to verify records. Holberton School, an unaccredited, project-based software-engineering institution, plans to use the technology to authenticate its certificates.
Sylvain Kalache, a co-founder of Holberton, calls the blockchain “unhackable,” and argues that it will permit employers to check whether candidates have exaggerated their training, which he says is a big problem in Silicon Valley, where the company is located. “It’s that mainly candidates and professionals lie on their résumé,” Mr. Kalache says, “which is expensive and quite laborious.” The process of checking applicants’ credentials could be streamlined, he says, if the blockchain became the norm.
Although none of Holberton’s 33 students have yet graduated, Mr. Kalache says that when they do, each will receive a degree-verification code.
“It’s like Google. You just type the ID into a blockchain explorer and get an answer in seconds,” he says. “Companies can automate this process, and it’s simple.” Verifying credentials is a pain for employers, students, and universities, he says, and the blockchain could replace that process.
But how does the blockchain stack up to the technology already used by institutions, like Coursera, that provide certificate graduates with verifiable codes?
“All of your assets on the blockchain are public-and-private-key infrastructure,” says Mr. Schmidt. He’s talking about the system that supports encryption keys that verify the identity of users and allow for the secure exchange of data. That, he says, is more secure than having your identity and assets linked to email, which is how Coursera works. “It’s very easy to hack email as an identity,” he says.
Sony Global Education is another player using the technology to store learning records.
Masaaki Isozu, president of the Sony subsidiary, says the records will “soon be tradeable and exchangeable on the peer-to-peer environment.” When that happens, individuals will be able to share information, such as academic measures of progress, in a secure way.
Other upstart institutions hope to use blockchain as a “more compelling” documentation of assessment. Teachur, recently launched on Kickstarter, aims to be an online repository for learning objectives from existing college courses. The for-profit start-up is still in its beta phase, but eventually it plans to use the information to piece together online degrees for as low as $1,000 apiece. The founders, M. Joshua Stanley and Benjamin W. Blair, say blockchain technology was the “missing piece” to starting their business.
After each assessment, exam scores, projects, or papers would be captured on the blockchain, acting as “one of the better portfolio systems,” Mr. Blair says.
Accreditation is the current standard for signifying legitimacy in an institution, but Mr. Stanley and Mr. Blair wonder if the blockchain has the power to set a new benchmark of verification. “Let’s take the institution out of the transaction,” Mr. Stanley says.
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