Decentralising Education

Embracing the new world of web3 to build entirely new education platforms

Sat Nov 26 2022

I’m a software developer in the education industry. Most of what I work on is standard centralised web technology, but I believe the new world of web3 and decentralisation has the potential to shake up this sector.

In this article I hope to share my vision on how web3 technologies could be utilised to achieve decentralised education.

Smart Certification

“Smart Certification” is a term I’m coining to describe a new way educational certification could work in web3.

Traditionally, educational certification comes not after completing study of a course, but after achieving a passing grade on one or more exams. Exams can be good but they have some drawbacks:

• You can’t test knowledge of the whole course: Normally the course being studied has too much content for it all to be examined, so the exam usually contains a randomised subset of the content. The idea behind this is that the students couldn’t know what content will be examined so they must revise everything equally. This however means exams can only really be a heuristic of your knowledge in the course. It’s entirely possible that you might be very knowledgeable on 95% of the content but be examined on the other 5%.
• Exams are a one shot thing: For obvious reasons, exams tend to happen only once and at a specific point in time. This means they can be heavily influenced by external factors such as illness or family grievance.
• Pressured recall may not be a good indicator of skill : some skills (such as software engineering, I would argue) can’t really be assessed in such a short time frame. Such skills are better assessed by a candidate’s development over time rather than how they perform in a fixed instant.

Smart certification is a system I propose whereby small iterative pieces of objective study are published on the blockchain and subjectively interpreted by 3rd parties to assess ability.

Let’s take a closer look at what the blockchain would look like in this scenario:

Each block is essentially a small “atomic unit” of learning that tracks everything a student does.

In the classic example of a company looking for a new employee, this would entail said company scanning the students public blockchain records to determine if they meet the requirements. This quickly gets impractical and every company would need it’s own department of educational experts to assess job applications. There should then be centralised companies and organisations that provide this as a service. They would offer a subjective interpretation of a student’s objective study progress as a service.

So our structure now looks like this:

Students study on centralised learning platforms that publish their study progress to a decentralised blockchain. The contents of this blockchain are then read by the smart certifiers and their analysis/conclusions are given to customers.

This is quite interesting as the providing of an educational platform is now completely decoupled from the idea of having to officially “certify” or “attest” a student’s ability to third parties.

Note in the diagram above that the “OpenLearn” organisation appears on both sides. There’s nothing stopping an organisation from providing learning and certification, but it could affect their credibility. This would have to be determined by their customers.

Most students will probably engage with many different learning platforms over their study so the blockchain actually looks more like this:

It would then be up to the smart certifiers to assess not only the students performance but also the credibility of the learning platform used. If for example we one day discover that the organisation who owns “DecEd” have been handing out study blocks for payment, the smart certifiers would stop acknowledging study from this learning platform. Of course they can be more fine grained in this decision and look at data around time or content as well.

Essentially each block in the chain is “signed” by the learning platform. No student would be able to fake studying with “LearnBee” as the block would not be verifiable from “LearnBee”‘s public key(s).

The role of the certifiers

It’s interesting to think about how the certifiers would actually work in this system. We know that they take the on-chain blocks as input, but what do they actually produce as output? Here’s some ideas:

• Each certifier could specialise in a certain subject area (e.g. software engineering, graphic design or biomedical sciences) and provide numerical scores for different aspects of that field (e.g. for software engineering: algorithms, distributed systems, operating systems). Customers of the certifiers could then either set specific thresholds they require people to meet or simply take the scores into consideration when making decisions about hiring/accepting. These scores can be determined algorithmically or by a human.
• Certifiers could offer more bespoke expertise based qualitative analysis in which an individual reviews a student’s records in order to provide recommendations/advice to customers.

It’s also interesting to realise that students themselves can be customers of the certifiers. As a student it might be desirable to know what certifiers think of your educational record and how you could improve it.

Advantages

Let’s take a look at some of the advantages of the approach:

• Decoupling learning platforms from educational certification greatly reduces the burden on the production of educational content. Learning platforms are free to develop engaging and exciting material for students without having to face the administrative (and sometimes legal) bureaucracy of attesting to 3rd parties.
• Keeping all educational records from all learning platforms on the blockchain makes it easy for a student to study in many different places while still contributing to their overall record.
• Using a cryptographic blockchain makes the educational records extremely reliable as they are pretty much impossible to forge.
• Decentralisation means your educational history is permanent and ubiquitous. Even if you’re a refugee from a war torn country arriving on the doorstep of a far off land, all your qualifications are just as valid and verifiable.
• And of course not forgetting what we mentioned earlier, we’ve potentially developed a platform here in which traditional exams are no longer required.

Disadvantages

• The validity and value of your educational records is now not as secure since the certifiers sit further away from the learning platforms. This could lead to a lot of instability of these records and ultimately make this approach not feasible.
• It’s tricky to decide how “atomic” each block of learning should be on the chain. Some platforms could post very tiny blocks containing a students individual answers to questions whereas others might simply post a single block for a whole course coupled with some kind of score. The idea is that it would be up to the certifiers to deal with these different detail levels, but it could be too limiting to not have a defined standard (see below)

Topics not discussed

• Privacy: We can’t really discuss a public blockchain solution without mentioned the “p” word. Having everyone’s records publicly on display to all probably isn’t what we want here.
• Tokenisation: Most blockchain systems have a tokenisation model to promote a flow of value through the system. It’s possible there could be some interesting tokenomics here between the students, learning platforms, certifiers and customers of the certifiers.
• Block standard: As mentioned above, it might be interesting to try and come up with a standard schema for how the atomic blocks of learning should be structured on the chain. It would have to be not too limiting as to make it difficult for new learning platforms to enter the eco-system.

Conclusion

One of the core concepts behind this idea is the objective blockchain. Everything on the blockchain is objectively true. This suits a blockchain quite well as it is immutable i.e. we will never be able to go back and change things in the future. This is also why the smart certifiers work off-chain. Their certifications are entirely subjective and can (and most definitely should) change as time goes on.

A lot of what we’ve discussed here is quite analogous to how credit scores are calculated. Records are contributed to by a range of organisations and then interpreted by credit analysts. It’s interesting to see how this pattern translates so well into the blockchain.

I think there are certainly some potential follow up articles to this one. I’ll update and link them here if I ever write them…