Blockchain as a model of trust for open education

Taken from: Innovation in Management

Blockchain has the potential to offer institutions a permanent and inviolable trusted infrastructure to certify, share, and verify a complete record of our educational achievements throughout our lives.

In a hyperconnected and constantly changing world, our current and future employability depends on our proven ability to create value in the new digital economy. Therefore, open and continuous education has become a kind of currency that unites all aspects of our lives.

The key idea behind open education is that learning is not artificially separated from the rest of life, but rather that learning is truly life. Open education thus makes possible an alternative vision of education by providing educators and students with a knowledge ecosystem that facilitates collaborative learning as a social experience.

A key challenge for the success of open education is translating learning into employability, This is because education received through open licenses and open content often lacks credentials that validate the skills, competencies, and experience acquired. The reality is that existing credential systems continue to heavily favor formal education over other learning experiences, hindering the development of valuable open education programs beyond school and university that foster the development of new competencies throughout professional life.

Hence the importance of establishing an open architecture for recognizing lifelong learning achievements. Blockchain, as a foundational technology, has the potential to offer institutions a permanent and inviolable trusted infrastructure to certify, share, verify, and maintain a comprehensive record of our educational achievements throughout our lives.

It is obvious that Blockchain, as an emerging technology, cannot single-handedly create trust where it does not exist. However, its distributed nature enables new collaborative, open, and reliable infrastructures, and its trust protocols have the potential to facilitate the new institutions necessary to rebuild trust in our social and economic order. This vision and its strategic implications are what we explore in the article I recently published on the blog of [the organization/institution name]. Open Education Association.

How does blockchain work?

Blockchain is usually associated with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. But at its core, it's a single, distributed ledger for recording transactions. What makes it special is that it's durable, tamper-proof, timestamped, transparent, and decentralized. These characteristics are equally useful for managing financial transactions, as with cryptocurrencies, and for a reputation system, as with digital certificates.

As such, blockchain basically consists of two separate elements: On the one hand, a distributed database technology, that supports an encrypted ledger, distributed and replicated across all nodes of the network, containing ordered chains of information blocks, which could represent transactions, identities, certifications, contracts, assets, or virtually anything that can be stored digitally, and on the other hand, a trust protocol, This allows community members with their own copy of the ledger to collectively validate ledger updates and prevent double entries. Trust is thus fully integrated into the blockchain infrastructure and requires no human intervention.

Once a transaction is recorded in the database and the ledgers are updated, the records cannot be altered, as they are linked to each previous transaction record (hence the term “chain”). Various cryptographic algorithms and computational approaches are used to ensure the integrity of the set, and that the database recording is permanent, chronologically ordered, and available to everyone else on the network. Blockchain technology thus eliminates error and the human factor in determining whether a transaction is trustworthy.

The potential of blockchain as a model of trust

Although blockchain was originally just the technology behind Bitcoin, it quickly became clear that its distributed database architecture had applications beyond cryptocurrencies. And what has truly captured my attention is the fact that the same blockchain principles that guarantee financial transactions can also be used for other purposes. to guarantee the trustworthiness of any transfer of social or economic value, without the need for a central structure (school, university, company or portal) that acts as a “third party” in the verification and validation of transactions.

This, on the one hand, offers improved fluidity and a higher transaction rate and, on the other hand, eliminates the bottlenecks associated with central authority and represents a significant reduction in costs.

But what's more, the distributed trust model, based on the blockchain community, is much more scalable and capable of handling the complexity of a hyper-connected society where the volume of interactions is multiplying at such a speed that it makes it impossible, without prohibitive costs, to guarantee the security and integrity of the system in a centralized way.

For all the reasons mentioned above, Blockchain, as a foundational technology, has the potential to offer institutions a permanent and inviolable trusted infrastructure for certifying, sharing, verifying, and maintaining a complete record of our educational achievements throughout our lives. It not only complements the missing technological components of some open digital certification initiatives, such as Openbadgets, but also enables us to openly share our credentials selectively and securely.

Digital certifications: open recognition for all.

The assessment and recognition of learning achievements is undoubtedly one of the essential elements in the educational process at any level, both in university and in lifelong learning. Assessment is linked to the quality of teaching and is an essential tool in the learning process. For individuals, learning outcomes and their development have significant consequences in terms of accreditation, finances, and learning itself.

In the case of open education based on open content and licenses, the evaluation process must be given even greater importance. Awarding credits to an individual poses a risk regarding the verification of their identity, the authenticity of their work, and their participation in the essential parts of the course necessary to guarantee learning outcomes. The quality control task or activity in open learning must ensure a rigorous process for identifying students and collecting evidence for their evaluation.

Open digital certifications are important because they create connections between employers, professionals, and open education communities. They establish a common framework for the recognition of skills and competencies. For organizations, open certificates help identify the quality of professionals through recognized and documented skills and competencies. For individuals, certificates are a way to showcase these skills and competencies, making them more visible in the job market.

For example, having academic records easily accessible in the cloud could make it easier to apply for jobs with companies that require verification of diploma or exam scores. Similarly, students attending university in another country or choosing to study abroad would appreciate the new ease of reliably and securely transmitting important academic files over a network, without geographical limitations.

The trail of credentials and achievements we build throughout our lives says something about who we are and can open doors that allow us to become who we want to be. Some credentials, like university degrees, count for more than others. But in a world of rapid change, all credentials represent experiences that are part of our lives, signs of our accomplishments, and markers of the communities to which we belong.

Early digital certification initiatives, such as Mozilla's Open Badges, have demonstrated the power of simple, affordable, and reliable technology to create an open recognition ecosystem that works across countries, educational sectors, businesses, social environments, and technologies. However, one of the limitations of this initiative is its centralized nature, since certificates reside on the servers of the original certificate issuers, and if those servers fail or the referral links are lost, the certificates can no longer be validated or verified.

Blockchain technology offers us the opportunity to explore alternative implementations based on a distributed trust model that doesn't require a central authority for storing and verifying certificates. New verification systems can thus be built on strong cryptography, making it easier to detect if a credential's content has been tampered with. Blockchain's public/private key systems can be used to authenticate both the issuer and the recipient of the certificate, potentially making fraud virtually impossible.

Issuing a certificate is thus relatively simple: the certificate issuer creates a digital file containing basic information such as the recipient's name, the issuer's name, a date of issue, etc. They sign the certificate's contents using a private key, to which only they, as the issuing authority, have access, and append that signature to the certificate itself, ensuring that the certification cannot be altered by anyone once it has been issued.

Next, the certificate is issued by creating a blockchain transaction that indicates we issued a specific certificate to a specific person on a specific date. The digital certificates are then recorded on the blockchain, and the system allows verification of who received the certificate, by whom, and validation of the certificate's contents.

Where to begin?

This vision of open recognition as a complement to open education can be supported by promoting blockchain as a core technology for capturing and sharing learning achievements, whether in formal, informal, or non-formal environments.

The most important work in making open certificates a reality is not technical, but rather related to institutions and governance. It will require everyone's effort to ensure that policies for digital credential systems are open and take into account the needs of all participants—students, educational institutions, businesses, and governments—and not, as is currently the case, prioritize the interests of some organizations over others.

This is the time to experiment, collaborate, and share experiences to harness the full potential of building a new ecosystem of digital credentials. For those interested in learning more, and potentially getting involved, a practical way to start is by asking Google. That is, by searching for companies and institutions that are launching blockchain-based applications in the education sector. Examples of interesting initiatives to follow include: MIT Digital Currency, the projects community Badge Chain y Blockcerts or the initiative of Sony Global Education, to integrate blockchain technology into its educational infrastructure.

All these initiatives give us a foundation and new tools to experiment with. Now we can begin building implementations and experimenting with blockchain-based credentials in different configurations and learn more about the best ways to manage and govern the evolution of open standards for digital credentials.

Although blockchain as a fundamental technology has the potential to create the "internet of value" and lay new foundations for our economic and social systems, just as with the internet, its adoption will take decades. It is therefore to be expected that the adoption of blockchain in the education sector will be gradual and steady, not sudden; it will consolidate as the technological and institutional transformations necessary to unlock its potential gain momentum. But if you're an innovator, you already know that when it comes to innovation, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Are you ready to give it a try?.

© Jorge Cabrera

NOTE: This article is for educational purposes. It is not a production of UCundinamarca.

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