Blockchain to Aid Higher Education and Revamp Employment Rates after COVID-19

In a matter of weeks, colleges and universities across the country halted face-to-face classes and moved instruction online. Students displaced from dorms are now grappling with the reality of food insecurity and even homelessness as the broader economy has stalled and jobless claims have soared. Dreams of economic mobility have been deferred for millions of learners who were pursuing new careers and credentials.

In periods of economic crisis, higher education typically serves as both a backstop for displaced workers and an engine for economic recovery. But today’s crisis is exposing widening fault lines between educational institutions and the demands of an increasingly dynamic labor market.  At the core of that challenge is a communications gap rooted in a disconnect between how higher  education and the labor market talk about, measure, and signal individuals’ skills.

Blockchain Aids Higher Education after COVID-19

Addressing issues of interoperability between education and employment is more important than ever. As we make our way through the crisis and into recovery, that imperative should encourage experimentation with approaches to credentialing (and hiring) that leverage the potential of new technologies to provide more granular descriptions of skills and improved communication among education and training organizations, individuals, and employers.

Blockchain, in particular, holds promise to create more efficient, durable connections between education and work. It can provide the technological fabric to help displaced workers translate their skills for new education opportunities and employers, and may hold particular value for those currently underserved by the existing education-to-employment paradigm.

Blockchain is a type of shared, distributed ledger technology (DLT) that uses an agreed upon and encrypted process to ensure that the information on the ledger is tamper proof and that the data on the blockchain can be trusted even without centralized, third-party validation. At its core, a DLT is about managing data, transactions, and relationships differently, particularly by avoiding reliance on a centralized authority to ensure that all participants on the blockchain, and their data, can be trusted.

This lack of a centralized authority could usher in a time when individuals can have more control of their own data, enhancing their ability to make transactions of all kinds and allowing select people to see and use their ledger. While DLT gained attention as a mechanism for conducting transactions for digital currencies like Bitcoin, the underlying applications, protocols, and networks and infrastructure can be used to document, verify, and share data about many things, including learning, knowledge, skills, and abilities and the credentials that represent them.

Because of its distributed nature, DLT allows for individualized ownership of one’s data (students, workers) while, somewhat paradoxically, assuring its trustworthiness for use by other stakeholders (K–12 schools, college and universities, employers). Key themes that must be kept in mind when coming up with possible solutions are emphases on data privacy, ownership and agency, life-

long learning, and stakeholder ecosystems. These themes are heartening each in their own right.

Data privacy and ownership agency are imperative if individuals, especially vulnerable populations, are to control how they use and share their human capital data in a distributed ledger.

Lifelong learning as a guiding principle suggests that documenting, verifying, and sharing evidence of learning cuts across many different types of centralizing institutions—for example, K–12 schools, colleges and universities, and employers—indicating the sensibility and strengths of distributed ledgers.

Stakeholder ecosystems are the existing set of relationships between organizations that transact through the education and learning of students and workers, including school registrars, college admissions officers, hiring managers, and information technology professionals and providers. These stakeholders already interact to ensure that learning moves across institutional boundaries in ways that make sense for students, workers, educational institutions, and businesses.

Pre-existing and robust stakeholder ecosystems are a critical foundation in early blockchain experiments and pilots, as they bring trust that predates the DLT to transactions, creating a space for blockchain to develop.

Learning Machine teamed up with the MIT Media Lab to create Blockcerts, an open standard platform for creating, issuing and verifying blockchain-backed certificates. By creating records (like academic transcripts and credentials) on a blockchain, the company can review the credibility of documents and discover falsified information.

Academic achievements — grades, transcripts and even diplomas —can be stored on a Blockcerts blockchain for immutable insight into past academic history. More than 600 of 2018 MIT graduates chose to receive a digital version of their diplomas on Blockcerts’ blockchain. Consequently, the students’ academic records will be stored forever and future employers can immediately verify them.

However, there are specific questions to guide a structured exploration of Blockcerts and other existing and emergent blockchain projects, adopting a holistic (technology and human systems) lens and keeping an eye on technology design and features, measurement, and value, and governance and organization. This allows us to assess the maturity of the technology.

Such questions are:

• What problems are you trying to solve and who are you trying to help?
• Who are your partners in this exploration?
• How does the blockchain change current systems and technology?
• Why is blockchain part of the solution, and how will you develop a system that puts your learners’ needs first?
• Can blockchain make the documenting, verifying, and sharing of credentials more equitable, affordable, and trustworthy in this circumstance?

In fact, as a society and economy, we must ensure that these new projects support improved opportunity to learn for all, preserve evidence of all quality learning, ensure equitable use of learning data, and empower learners and workers to use their data to pursue a prosperous life and promote economic growth.

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, learners will be more mobile, moving in and out of formal education as their job, health, and family situations change. This mobility will be true both for students already in the educational pipeline and for the working adults who will turn to higher education to retool and reenter the job market. They will need consistent ways to document their learning and bring their records with them.

Our institutions will, likewise, struggle to find their footing in ways that are distinct from previous recessions. More than a handful may close during this period. It is an extreme possibility, but one we must prepare for—and it will force us to reconsider our role as the sole owners of student records.

We must be more willing than ever to test innovations that could equitably help people better develop and share their skills. Creativity and experimentation will be essential for higher education to continue to open the doors to opportunity.

By Eloisa Marchesoni, consultant in Blockchain and A.I, as well as author of articles for the major national and international sector newspapers. In the process of publishing book “Tokenization processes and new economic paradigms” for Maggioli Editore.

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