Highlights:

  • ASU is researching on blockchain technology to offer enhanced education to learners.
  • ASU has a goal of supporting approximately 100,000 online learners by 2025, said Donna Kidwell, CTO at EdPlus at Arizona State University.

Virtual learning was gaining attraction from several universities and schools even earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic. Universities and schools such as the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, USC, George Washington University, Harvard, and Rutgers have taken their few or all Fall 2020 semester virtually in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Responsibilities that were once led head-on must now be completed remotely. Blockchain technology helps to ease the process with extra transparency and safety. Thus, playing a key role in higher education, both in terms of student administration and classroom.

“At Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2019 conference, I had a chance to speak with Donna Kidwell, CTO at EdPlus at Arizona State University, about the institution’s plans for blockchain,” said Bill Detwiler, Editor in Chief of TechRepublic and the host of Cracking Open, CNET and TechRepublic’s popular online show.

Kidwell commented that ASU has a goal of supporting approximately 100,000 online learners by 2025. ASU is already supporting about 55,000 students.

“Blockchain will play a key role in helping them meet that goal by allowing ASU to better track and certify each student’s “learning accomplishments,” Kidwell explained. “Having a trusted, portable record of someone’s educational achievements is particularly important today, as most students don’t follow a traditional four-year college degree path.”

A combination of identity management technology with blockchain and a public ledger will assist institutes such as ASU in developing transparent trust into each learner’s transcript.

About ASU

ASU is a top-ranked research university in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. As per the report by professional recruiters and rankings services, ASU’s nationally ranked courses motivate the best-certified graduates and have positioned the university as a “top-tier” hiring institution by more than 50 of the nation’s leading corporations.