Credentialing

How Blockchain Will Disrupt the Higher Education Transcript

Blockchain technology could offer a more learner-centered alternative to traditional credentialing.

Last year, the MIT Media Lab began issuing digital certificates to the participants in its Director's Fellows program. The authentication behind the certificates relies on blockchain technology, best known for its connection to the cryptocurrency bitcoin.

In a blog post, Philipp Schmidt, director of learning innovation at the Media Lab, described how blockchain works: "In essence, it is a just a distributed ledger to record transactions. What makes it special is that it is durable, time-stamped, transparent and decentralized. Those characteristics are equally useful for managing financial transactions as for a system of reputation. In fact, you can think of reputation as a type of currency for social capital, rather than financial capital."

The technology has tremendous potential for higher education, according to Phil Long, chief innovation officer and associate vice provost for learning sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. In a May 12 Future Trends Forum video chat hosted by consultant and futurist Bryan Alexander, Long pointed to credentialing as an obvious first place to apply blockchain in higher ed.

A Learner-Centered Transcript

A transcript is the record of what a student has accomplished at a university. The document is managed and controlled by the institution, not the student. In contrast, Long said, blockchain has the potential of providing an immutable record of an individual learner's accomplishment that can be disclosed in a public context. "The single thing that attracted me most is the potential it has to reaffirm the learner's ownership of their own record," he said.

Today when you get a credential from an institution, you receive a piece of paper, but ultimately anybody who wants to verify that credential goes back to the source. Yet new models of higher education are complicating that process, Long pointed out. "The notion that you will go to one university for all the training you need for your career is quite passé. In the future, many learners will have earned credentials from a range of institutions," he said. For anyone to validate those records, they are going to have to go back to every single source. "Is [blockchain] a way that that kind of intermediary chain can be broken?" Long asked. With blockchain technology, he said, "the assertion of the authenticity is made at the time it is created; there is no need to validate it thereafter."

Blockchain is scaring a lot of people, he added, "because its fundamental characteristic is the elimination of intermediaries — which is one of the reasons the financial industry became so excited when bitcoin was created."

New Types of Learning

One forum attendee asked Long if blockchain could help provide credentialing for MOOCs and other types of learning outside brick-and-mortar institutions.

If an institution is confident in asserting that the individual who has completed a MOOC has achieved certain accomplishments, the answer is absolutely yes, Long said. "The learner could have a record of their learning from MOOCs, professional development activities and universities."

Extending the idea further, Long referenced the work of a colleague from France, Serge Ravet, who suggests blockchain could be used to exchange social capital among individuals. For example, he said, the Future Trends Forum is a kind of learning community. "If you are getting value out of the way in which Bryan Alexander has pulled together members of the community in these sessions, in Serge's view, you would have a Twitter-like application where through the hashtag you could offer to Bryan a social piece of capital that says 'I valued this interaction' and it would go into Bryan's blockchain." And there would be an accumulation of that chain of affirmation and reputation that he would accrue — in essence the community validating itself. "That is sort of the anarchistic extreme of this idea," Long said.