Blockchain and the Digital Credentialing for Education System

Abstract

A blockchain technique is a sequence of encrypted, peer-to-peer transactions that, together, constitutes a distributed ledger. Starting with the conceptualisation of Bitcoin in 2008, both platforms and their applications are evolving rapidly. Following the launch of the Ethereum platform in mid-2015, “smart contracts” that are secured in a set of blockchain transactions have been proposed for just about anything of value. This includes education qualifications and several universities are now offering digital certificates that are recorded in a blockchain. In parallel with these digital innovations—part of the emerging Web 3.0—the long-established ways of verifying university qualifications are becoming non-viable. Developed for a very different world, where few went into higher education and everyone could be expected to identify every university, the traditional systems of certification are non-scalable, increasingly unintelligible and inefficient. It is also inappropriate for new challenges, such as the widespread loss and destruction of records through contemporary wars and the extent of forced migrancy. At the same time, the combination of the large numbers of those now qualifying in higher education, along with the ever-increasing sophistication of work, means that many people hold qualifications from several universities, along with a cluster of certificates attesting to specialised competencies. Both individuals and employing institutions need a system of verification that provides a secure, immutable profile of a person’s full and constantly developing professional profile. This paper evaluates the fit between the new and evolving opportunities of the blockchain and the requirements for the radical reform of the ways in which higher education qualifications are certified and can be verified.