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The academic use of blockchain platforms opens up new routes to accredit education and record examination assessments.
The next edition of our webinar entitled “Micro-credentials in education: a blockchain application” will explain the relationship between blockchain platforms, academic accreditation, and micro-credentials.
We will broadcast this edition through our Facebook page Tuesday, March 23, 2021. Anabella Laya Vizcaino will join us. She’s the co-founder of Acreditta, a pioneer using blockchain in academia, and an expert in knowledge economics. To make the most of this upcoming webinar, we introduce some basic notions for understanding what blockchain is, its purpose, and why it has become an educational trend.
What is Blockchain?
When we think of blockchain’s definition, we do not usually imagine that it could have an educational purpose because of its common association with cryptocurrency, but that is just one type of blockchain. In reality, this term defines a single, consensual record distributed across multiple nodes in a network.
The details of each transaction are recorded in blocks in a digital community ledger. In each block, all members must validate the transaction. All involved have a copy of the records of these transactions, making data alteration extremely difficult.
Blockchain and accreditation
This new way to record, store, and interconnect data is tremendously useful for validating and securing academic degrees. The use of these platforms ensures authenticity, trust, transparency, immutability, and integrity of registered information, which is decentralized and interconnected without third-party mediators.
How does this translate into safe and expedited accreditation? A user on a blockchain platform has a unique signature linked to all their transactions. What would happen if, instead of financial recordings, the transactions were academic grades or degrees? Universities can issue academic certifications and permanently store them in an information ecosystem with immutable data that cannot disappear if the institution ceases to exist, nor can the data be transferred to another user. Tecnológico de Monterrey has already tested the implementation of this nature’s accreditation systems, opening new horizons in the candidate/human-resources-specialist relationship.
Employers can access this information from the universities with certainty that each certification corresponds to real learning by the students who completed the course described in the certification. The blockchain system has features beneficial for the continuity and validation of micro-credentials, which are digital certifications that provide evidence that an individual has mastered a specific skill or knowledge area. The practice of quickly certifying job candidates’ skills has become a trend thanks to social media, employment-related websites, and job search databases, such as LinkedIn, Indeed, and OCC. Recruiting specialists behind these sites needed a quick and reliable way to ensure that candidates applying for a job have the right skills to perform it. With the advent of the blockchain, one could say they found it.
What do you think of using blockchain for academic purposes? Do you believe micro-credentialing is good practice for validating students’ and job candidates’ skills? To learn more, don’t miss our next webinar this March 23, live on our Facebook page.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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