How Blockchain Technology Will Disrupt Higher Education

Out of sight of most people, the information-technology world has been absorbed in a decade-long experiment with a technology called blockchain, an unwieldy and improbably expensive witches’ brew of software and mathematics that solves no readily apparent problem that matters in everyday life. Nevertheless, blockchain technology (or a close relative) will very likely disrupt much of the business of higher education.

It will do so by solving a problem that few of us realized we had: There’s no reliably efficient and consistent way to keep track of a person’s entire educational history. That’s why a worldwide effort is underway to use blockchain technology to tame the internet so that it can become a universal, permanent record of educational achievement.

Blockchain borrows from the infrastructure that enables cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to function independently of central authorities. Because it relies on the mathematics of cryptography, blockchain technology is impenetrable to most people. Yet in the age of the internet, we have grown accustomed to relying on tools that are not easily understood.

Most people, for example, are only dimly aware that the simple act of opening a web browser initiates a stream of coded messages to thousands of computers that route information around the world. Because they allow millions of users, who have never met, to securely agree on a single, global ledger, blockchains are now being adapted to create autonomous entities to record contracts, keep track of financial transactions, manage the flow of materials through global supply chains, or (as envisioned for higher education) create public records of individual accomplishment.

Last year, Georgia Tech’s Commission on Creating the Next in Education, which I co-chaired, recommended that the university commit itself to eliminating the artificial barriers between different kinds of schooling that would discourage lifetime education. We recognized that institutions would have to throw out time-tested ways of doing business, starting with the transcripts we use to keep track of what students learn. Locked in information silos, traditional college transcripts are closed and inscrutable. An entire ecosystem of unaccountable third parties exists only to analyze, compare, and interpret them.

Accreditors tell us what a credit hour means as a unit of learning. Commercial services like PayScale predict lifetime earning potential for graduates of this college or that major field of study. Publications like U.S. News rank colleges along every conceivable dimension to establish a kind of reputational reality. Recruiting and referral companies scout for potential employees. Federal regulations govern the release of transcript information, while analysts combine that information into monstrous data warehouses that undermine personal privacy. These entities, which attempt — not inexpensively — to gauge student ability and achievement, mostly reveal the obvious limitations of the current system.

Students are more than transcripts and test scores. The college transcript is a 19th-century invention that has little do to with the educational institutions and workplaces of the 21st century. Like many of our peers, Georgia Tech recognized that lifetime learners would follow nontraditional educational trajectories (jumping between traditional university coursework, online and employer certifications, and other new alternatives to the course unit), and that the American system of transcripts would need a digital overhaul. That’s where blockchains come in.

Blockchains promise to allow colleges to ditch the traditional, musty transcript in favor of a single, secure, global, distributed “registrar” to record all educational achievement. With blockchain technology, it is now possible to create a decentralized transcript. Unlike today’s standard, centralized transcripts, which are secure and tamperproof but unadaptable to the modern, digital lifetime learner, decentralized transcripts would be secure and tamperproof but also open to an entire network of contributors.

New blockchain-based industries are able to synchronize that network until everyone has a consistent ledger. If these new decentralized transcripts can manage to balance security and privacy with an open design that permits applications to connect stakeholders, extract data, and add value to individual records and institutions, costly third-party authorities would not be needed. Students, educational providers, and employers might be able to cooperate in a system that provides a more well-rounded picture of educational achievement.

It is too soon to tell how all this will work out. Pilot projects are already underway to test the feasibility of the underlying concepts. Blockchain certificates are already being issued and exchanged among dozens of institutions. Many registrars’ offices are warily planning for a future in which artificial barriers between different kinds of education can be eliminated.

The pathway for educational technology from laboratory demonstrations to widespread use is usually straightforward: Pedagogy is improved, markets are identified, products are developed, and, if they think about it at all, people eventually wonder how colleges worked before that marvelous gadget existed. That is as true for simple classroom tweaks like the blackboard as for complex infrastructure innovations like the internet.

What successful educational technologies seem to have in common is a simply stated problem and quantifiable benefits that ensue from solving it. That is the daunting hurdle facing blockchain technology. I am betting that the benefits of lifetime education will overcome the technical, commercial, and cultural challenges.