The current education system is out of date. It is based on fear, uncertainty, and doubt, forcing everyone to mold into the standard cast of a perfect student, or else stay unemployed and useless. Perhaps, this was the need of time when the education system was first developed, millenniums ago! However, the time has changed and there is no guarantee that a perfect student will have a perfect job anymore. The traditional education system is now exhausted and needs an upgrade. This is where blockchain can play its part. Blockchain has emerged as the go-to technology for implementing changes in existing industries and can be used to disrupt the education industry as well.

Implementing blockchain in the education industry will provide access-to-knowledge to users anywhere in the world, ensure the safety of education records and transactions, enable quick verification, and bypass the red tape associated with the traditional education system. In short, it will make education easily attainable and more credible.

Verification Of Credentials

The current education system involves a lot of paper work to prove the credentials of people. It is an antiquated system since getting false paperwork done is a matter of a few clicks online these days. At the moment, any verification process involves reaching out to the respective university, which in turn contacts national registrars and they go back-and-forth with the details of the candidate before ensuring that the degree is in fact valid. Given that hundreds of thousands of individuals require degree verification every day around the globe, this is a loss of precious man hours and effort on behalf of the verifiers.

Blockchain implementation would allow the employers to quickly make sure that the claimed credentials are in fact true. Along with simplifying the authentication process, having certification data on blockchain would ensure that the credentials do not get damaged or lost.

Decentralized And Adaptive Education  

The current global education system is a mess. Different parts of the world have a different standard of education and different institutions have their own style of testing the students. Institutes like MIT are working on implementing blockchain to decentralize the education management system responsible for recording and referencing educational data. The decentralized system will also allow for quick adaptation of registration, grading, curriculum, and attendance, depending upon the changing trends in the world. Any changes can be made quickly, without requiring mediation from higher education bodies and ministries.  

Affordable Education

Brick and mortar education system has totally failed the people who come from a poor financial background, with costs of attaining quality education skyrocketing each year. People have to go under debt just to attain an education, without any guarantees of securing a job after their graduation.

By developing blockchain based MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) to offer to countries all over the world, ed-tech companies are now making it possible for people with limited finances to get the best education. The MOOCs are given by the top professors of the world, to an audience all over the globe - a feat that is never possible to achieve with the conventional education system. The pioneer in this revolution is a company called BitDegree, which has innovated a ‘learn and earn’ education model to incentivize the students to complete their courses with focus and determination. The logic behind this strategy is that students, especially from poorer backgrounds, can often drop out of their courses as they are unable to get immediate benefits from their lessons. With the ‘learn and earn’ program, students can look forward to gaining reward for their effort, every time they finish a lesson successfully.

Conclusion

The future of learning is on the blockchain and in your hands. The education industry is on its way to disruption, one step at a time. Online education has already changed the dimension of modern learning, but with the backing of the blockchain, the students of tomorrow will have unmatched ease of accessing the highest quality of knowledge and mastering skills, without being discriminated by their ability to pay or the country of their birth.