In the modern age, a good education has become an essential building block of a happy and prosperous life. However, the increasing pace of technological and scientific advancements means that it might no longer be sufficient to rely on your old academic qualifications alone. You must continuously learn about new developments in your field if you wish to remain competitive in the job market.

It was in this environment that online learning first took root. It is now one of the fastest growing segments, with global growth estimated to be well over 7% per annum over the next decade. But this might not prove to be enough. There are still a lot of gaps between traditional classroom-based education and their online counterparts. And this is the gap that various EdTech start-ups on this list aim to fill. All of these entrepreneurs have chosen to take ICO route to get the necessary resources to get their projects rolling. We present the Top 10 ICO’s disrupting the education and learning industry.

BitDegree is a promising new foray into the field of online education. It uses the blockchain to offer students best-in-class online courses while also providing incentives like token scholarships and achievement tracking.

It further provides businesses an opportunity to shape the content in a way that suits their real-world needs and allows them to hire employees who can be productive from day one.

The main idea is to reduce the gap between course-providers, learners, and recruiters and thus create a system that is more valuable for all of them.

The idea behind Gilgamesh is to create a social network for everything related to books.

It uses Ethereum’s blockchain and smart contract technology to offer a secure, cheap and rapid way for authors, readers, critics and service providers to exchange content and services. Many recent tech start-ups are removing the middlemen and connecting the content creator directly with the end user.

Gilgamesh hopes to do this for authors and give them complete control over their content and revenue, which they traditionally had to share with their publishers.

This might well be a dream come true for the nerds amongst us. IQeon wants to “pay” users to play (and win) intelligent games on their platforms!

They already have a few games up and more are currently under-development both in-house and by independent developers.

The platform promises developers a wide audience for games published on their platform.

To gamers, they offer token rewards for playing intelligent games which can be exchanged for fiat money or other cryptocurrencies.

The moment you open LiveEdu’s website, you are greeted with a number of online courses ranging from game development to data analytics to server administration and so on.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg as the team behind LiveEdu wants to build the “world's biggest project-based learning library on any topic”.

Their efforts are aided by over 13,000 streamers who have so far created about 200,000 videos on a vast variety of topics.

The team is continuously expanding their content categories and working to monetize the content in an effort to attract even more content creators to their learning platform.

The team behind the OS.UNIVERSITY project wants to completely change academia and corporate hiring using the Ethereum blockchain.

The idea is to match learners, universities, and businesses on the blockchain using smart contracts.

This eliminates middlemen like recruiting firms and gives companies direct access to potential employees based on their skillset requirement.

The candidates can also access the learning marketplace offered by universities to build skills and showcase them to potential employers in a secure and verifiable manner.

The interest in cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed over recent years. However, this meteoric rise has created a vast chasm between interest and knowledge about cryptocurrencies.

This is the void that Extra Credit, in association with Bitcoin Homework, aim to fill.

They want to offer hundreds of online courses of varying complexity to help students better understand cryptocurrencies.

Various courses would be designed for different age groups and you can select one based on your current level of understanding.

One way of thinking about Edgecoin is as a blockchain based digital CV.

Users can pay for courses at major e-learning platforms and receive their certificates via smart contracts.

Over time, all their achievements, certificates, degrees and eventually even employment history would be available on the blockchain and available to potential recruiters instantly.

Such a platform would eliminate the need for maintaining paper based documentation or getting certificates authenticated.

While most online and university courses provide a “broad stroke” understanding of issues, a personalized tutor can adapt a course based on your exact needs, timeframe and skill level.

It is this burgeoning online tutoring market that NTOK wants to tap into through its blockchain based solutions.

They want to create a peer-to-peer learning platform (direct from tutor to student) which relies on a system of ratings and advanced audio, video, and whiteboard tools for learning.

TEKY wants to turn your kids into techies themselves. It offers unique courses to children between the ages of 4 to 17.

Children can learn about robotics and engineering, programming, app development, 3D technology, and multimedia. But that’s not all that TEKY does.

They also have an e-commerce platform which sells smart-tech toys and gadgets.

Their whole product offering bundles STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) toys with basic STEM education. An interesting combination indeed.

HR departments spend considerable time and money to perform background checks and verify the credentials of potential hires.

There are audit companies which specialize in performing these checks and they send out people to contact colleges, university, previous employers and perform these reference checks.

BCDiploma wants to streamline this process and offer a blockchain based, trustworthy alternative to this entire process.

This can drastically reduce the time spent by companies on verification checks and make life easier for candidates as well as academic institutions.