Educational institutions are turning their attention to the public blockchain to record and verify student credentials. Under normal circumstances, recording student achievements using paperwork can be labor-intensive and costly, making blockchain a significant step toward maximizing cheapness, security and transparency.
Holberton School of software engineering , based in San Francisco, is now actively recording student achievements through blockchain. In October 2015, the institution announced its plans, making it the world’s first school to authenticate academic certificates in this way.
An example of what an academic certificate stored in the Bitcoin blockchain from Holberton School would look like can be seen on Merkle.io .
According to HireRight , 86 percent of employers surveyed said that screening had exposed a candidate who had lied on his or her resume. Holberton School understands the struggles that companies face, which is one of the reasons it chose to store students’ academic records in the blockchain, Sylvain Kalache, co-founder of the school, told Bitcoin Magazine .
“For employers, it avoids having them spend valuable time checking candidates’ educational credentials by having to call universities or to pay a third party to do the job,” he said.
And using the blockchain helps to save the school money by not having to build and operate its own database of records.
“Because of the design of the blockchain’s distributed database, it cannot go down and cannot be altered, making the data always available and secure,” Kalache said. “It’d be a big responsibility if we were to build and maintain such an infrastructure. The blockchain does this free of charge.
“Our students are very happy about the fact that their academic qualifications will be secure in the storage of the future,” Kalache said. “They also see how the industry is massively investing in the blockchain, and they are proud to be part of the […]
