Is Blockchain the Future of Academic Credentials?

Laura Buckman for The Chronicle

ITT Technical Institutes abruptly shut its doors in 2016 just as the fall semester was beginning, stranding thousands of students at its 130 campuses. Ten of those campuses were in Texas, and Joe May, chancellor of the Dallas County Community College District, wanted to help. The problem was the students’ academic records were still locked away in the now-dead for-profit’s databases, and the district’s officials couldn’t verify the credentials.

May consulted with Manoj Kutty, an educational tech entrepreneur, on how to avoid the problem in the future. The answer, they decided, was in blockchain.

Known primarily as the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, blockchain is a distributed ledger. When a user enters new information into the ledger, a student’s transcript for example, that information becomes a “block” in a decentralized network of computers. Blocks are given a unique tag, called a “hash,” and chained together in a specific order — hence, “blockchain.”

The technology has two main benefits. First, if a block is altered after the initial transaction, the hash will change, signaling that the data has been tampered with. And second, because the network is decentralized, anyone can view the blockchain at any time.

For academic credentials, the benefits of blockchain technology are obvious. It protects against falsified credentials, and it gives students direct access to their own transcripts, cutting the need to go through a campus registrar. Students and the issuing college are the only parties able to view or share the credentials. Had ITT Tech’s records existed on a blockchain technology, the displaced students could have still obtained their credentials instead of being at the mercy of a sudden bankruptcy.

Enabling students to own their credentials helps “reduce barriers for students to move from high school to college, and from college to employment,” says Kutty, now CEO of GreenLight Credentials, which created a blockchain-based credential app that the Dallas college district uses.

More than 600 colleges have accepted student transcripts through GreenLight since its introduction in July, but only a handful of Texas-based institutions — high school districts, community colleges, and four-year institutions — store student records using the app.

Kutty’s GreenLight Credentials isn’t the only pioneer in the blockchain-credentials space. Arizona State has started to provide transfer-students’ records using blockchain, a university group led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wants to develop a new standard for digital credentials, and the American Council on Education is working with a group of 32 primarily online-focused institutions known as the Presidents’ Forum on a plan to explore the technology for academic credentials.

Each of those experiments with blockchain technology is working toward a different end, whether it’s full transcripting, offering only digital degrees, or creating lifelong-learner profiles. On that last point, Kutty and some others believe that blockchain could eventually allow for a student record so comprehensive that it would list not just postsecondary degrees but also such verified capacities as empathy or critical thinking. And all agree that, as work-force demands fluctuate, using blockchain for academic credentials could help colleges better respond to student needs.

“A lot of what has driven interest in blockchain is people have looked at their own record-keeping protocols, which can be very antiquated, and thought we need to modernize this,” says Christopher Wilmer, co-founder of Ledger, a peer-reviewed journal for blockchain-related research. “They see the benefits that other people talk about when using blockchain technology.”

Blockchain offers more control to students and could one day help companies find qualified employees, Kutty says. But it isn’t without its limits. The technology needs a critical mass of users to reach its potential, something blockchain has had trouble with before, and the human element could introduce a host of unforeseen complications.

The technology entered the mainstream only about five years ago, but David Andrews, president of National University and one of the founding directors of the Presidents’ Forum, says that rarely has higher education changed its mind on an innovation as quickly as it has with blockchain. He estimates the technology will be widely adopted for managing students’ credentials in three to five years.

“Once you get to a tipping point,” Andrews says, “then everyone will see the value of getting on board because then it’s one-stop shopping for credentials.”

Laura Buckman for The Chronicle

There’s an App for That

When Joe May and Kutty developed the idea of using blockchain technology for students’ academic credentials, Robert Mong, president of the University of North Texas at Dallas, was one of the first people they took it to.

May, Kutty, and Mong are all heavily involved with the Dallas County Promise, a coalition of institutions that provides tuition assistance and advising to high-school seniors. The coalition also helps local institutions work toward the state’s “60x30TX” pledge, whose goal is for 60 percent of Texans ages 25 to 34 to earn a degree or certificate by 2030. A blockchain-based credentialing system, May says, could make it easier for high-schoolers to accomplish that.

“We were brainstorming about what can we do to reduce the friction that is often associated with applying for community college or trade school or four year,” Mong says. “Many of these students don’t have computers at home, but they do have smartphones.” With the GreenLight app, the credentials are in the student’s pocket.

In addition to the community-college district and UNT-Dallas, three independent school districts — Dallas, Grand Prairie, and Garland — signed on. Each serves largely high-poverty areas of Texas, Mong says, and with the app, the colleges hope to build a stronger bond with the students.

GreenLight uploaded 1.7-million records from the community-college district, spanning back to 1965. Within a few months, Kutty says, thousands of students had taken advantage of the convenience, sending their records to more than 600 institutions. The benefits were already apparent.

Sharing transcripts with the app is seamless and instant, Kutty says, with records going to Baylor, Florida State, and Western Governors Universities, along with Emerson College. UNT-Dallas has also received records via GreenLight, but the university’s own records won’t be fully transferred to the platform until early next year.

As GreenLight proceeds, Kutty imagines that all sorts of documents, not just transcripts, will be hosted on the blockchain, creating a portfolio of skills and experiences for students. Students’ résumés, letters of recommendation, and immunization records could all reside on the platform. He envisions a world where students no longer seek out work; employers will instead recruit them after spotting their profiles, with credentials verified on blockchain.

As a test of whether posting academic records on the blockchain is useful and justified, Kutty says he poses two questions to himself: “Would I benefit today, and would I be glad that I have instant access to all of my credentials that I could share?”

“And the answer is hell yeah.”

‘Exciting Time’ for Registrars

GreenLight Credentials is a for-profit entity. So are Salesforce, Arizona State’s blockchain partner, and Blockcerts, which provides Central New Mexico Community College’s digital diplomas. Right now, GreenLight charges $1 per student, Kutty says. But not all of the blockchain proposals for academic credentials are for-profit.

The partnership between the Presidents’ Forum and the American Council on Education is part of a contract awarded by the Department of Education. While the collaboration hasn’t officially begun, Andrews believes it is uniquely positioned to lead a shift toward blockchain-based credentials.

Online-first colleges, like Andrews’s National University and Western Governors University, often witness more of the chaos associated with receiving student transcripts. “Our undergraduates come in with 100 credit hours from five different institutions and it adds four to six weeks to our processing time just to collect all of their transcripts,” Andrews says. “And sometimes they’ll forget there was a sixth school where they took one semester and didn’t even finish or something.”

The Presidents’ Forum, he says, offers a built-in critical mass of more than 1.5-million student credentials to transition to the blockchain.

“Once we get our registrars’ offices aligned and thinking about it in the right way,” Andrews says, “I think there’s going to be a groundswell of interest.”

The MIT-led effort, operating under the working name of the Digital Credentials Consortium, involves a dozen elite universities from across the globe. Philipp Schmidt, director of learning innovation in MIT’s Media Lab, saw tech companies like GreenLight and the federal government interested in blockchain, but little interest in higher education. Colleges and universities should play a prominent role in setting the industry standard for digital credentials, he believes, to inspire the sort of confidence in the technology that will encourage mass adoption later on. The group plans to release its first white paper on digital credentials before the end of the year.

Earlier this decade, Schmidt was involved in the development of open-source code for anchoring academic badges to the blockchain. Learning Machine, the for-profit company that operates Blockerts, used some of that source code. The university group, however, is taking a different approach by not necessarily focusing on blockchain as the ultimate solution. Instead, the universities are researching the best ways to offer academic credentials that are secure and student-controlled.

“We’re trying to be driven more by the problem, and it may be that the problem ends up with that solution,” says Steve Harmon, director of education innovation at the Georgia Institute of Technology, another member of the university group. “For us, the solution that we’re looking for is something that gives us flexibility and granularity beyond the common transcript that you get at a registrar.”

Like GreenLight, the university group wants to create a lifelong-learning profile for students, including even the smallest skills that could be demonstrated to employers. But ultimately, that group wants to set the standard for third-party tech companies and all institutions to follow, said Matt Lisle, director of digital learning technologies at Georgia Tech.

The group hopes that, despite the competition for market share using blockchain technology, the reputations of its members will encourage adoption of its standard.

“It’s messy and it’s fragmented and there’s all this incredible value sitting in these credentials and in the data that we’re not able to unlock right now, and technology can play an important role in making that happen,” Schmidt says. “I was speaking to a registrar at a large Midwestern university yesterday actually who said, ‘There’s never been a more exciting time to be a registrar.’”

Maybe Decades Away

Some blockchain experts are skeptical of the optimistic timescale for widespread adoption. Many likened the current state of blockchain-based credentials to the early days of the internet. Although the technology is new, exciting, and full of possibilities, it will take some as-yet unseen innovation like a search engine to wrangle it into something manageable. Even then, it will take still more time for people to trust it.

Chris Rice, managing partner the consultancy Refuturing, believes that many of the problems that the advent of blockchain-based credentials purports to fix could be solved with better policy instead.

“Would it be easier to get every institution in the United States to agree on a common student data structure, implement that, implement a wholly decentralized technology from which they will a) not profit and b) not have control of and do this out of the goodness of their heart?” Rice asks. Or is it easier to imagine “a wave of good governance” coming along to solve the problem? Rice believes the latter.

While the government is at least beginning to explore the potential of blockchain credentials, for-profit companies and colleges are already entering and fracturing the space. Questions around the eventual interoperability of the different systems could pose a problem, though not a catastrophic one, some say.

What will actually delay the mass adoption of digital credentials is trust, says Wilmer, the blockchain-research journal editor, who is also an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. “The academic institutions will always trust their own privately held records as the ultimate authority,” he said, though he imagines that decades from now, after the blockchain and institutional systems have run parallel to each other for a while, the blockchain will become the authoritative record.

But that will require complete trust from all parties involved: the students, the colleges, the government, the employers, and anyone else acquiring or issuing credentials. The early adopters like the Dallas County Community College District, Arizona State, and MIT have displayed that complete trust already, but getting buy-in nationwide could be a taller task.

Then again, Maryville University announced that it would be offering digital diplomas through Blockcerts to all of its graduating students this December and has already granted digital diplomas to some August graduates. The move is part of that university’s Lighthouse Project, a plan to move many of the university’s processes online to improve the student experience, says Stephanie Elfrink, vice president for operational excellence.

Not all of the new digital credentials will be through blockchain, but many will. And Feng Hou, Maryville’s “chief digital transformation evangelist,” says the university is working on creating a student digital profile that is career-focused, like the lifelong-learner profile that GreenLight plans to offer.

“This is where the future of digital transformation and academic records is going,” Elfrink said. Maryville, at least, hopes so.

Corrections [12/5/2019, 10:57 a.m.]: A photo caption in this article originally misspelled TJ Vaughns’s name. Philipp Schmidt did not help develop a for-profit company, as stated in an earlier version of this article, and Blockcerts is a set of software tools, not a company. The caption and article have been corrected.

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.