Blockchain Innovation Challenge
Section 1 Content
The challenge sought technology-enabled solutions that reoriented the education and employment ecosystem around the individuals that they aim to serve. It invited teams to articulate a vision and design pilots that addressed an ecosystem-first designed approach driving interoperability, social mobility, and learner control expanding on these essential themes:
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Empower all learners: How can learners exercise agency over their digital identities, including all records of learning, so they can share them in a secure, validated, and machine-readable way?
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Unlock lifelong learning: How can learning be better documented, validated, and shared no matter where it occurs? How can control or ownership of learning records improve the way underserved learners connect and unlock disparate learning opportunities?
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Improve economic mobility: How can blockchain help learners to find in-demand education in employment-relevant skills to advance economic mobility and to fulfill the promise of higher education?
Blockchain Innovation Challenge Winners
Section 2 Content
The Education Blockchain Initiative Steering Committee selected projects based on their potential to scale across institutions, states, industries, learner populations, learner socioeconomic status, and learner timelines. The rigorous selection process, including a prescreen and a technical review in addition to the main evaluation, ensured that biases and conflicts of interest were negated.
The four winners of the Blockchain Innovation Challenge were:
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Student1, in collaboration with the Nebraska Department of Education and Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, to create comprehensive learner records for the one-third of all Nebraska K–12 students who are involved with multiple state educational, judicial, or behavioral services. Other Nebraska state-level partners include Children and Family Services, Behavioral Health, Juvenile Court, Job Corp, and the Department of Correctional Services.
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Texas Woman’s University, to establish a consortium of institutions in the Denton, Texas, region that use a shared credentialing platform to allow students to store and share their educational records with colleges and employers. Partners include the University of Texas-Arlington, Texas A&M University-Commerce, North Central Texas College, Carrolton-Farmers Branch Independent School District, and GreenLight.
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The Lifelong Learner Project, Powered by Teachers, to develop a digital wallet in which teachers can store and access their credentials, licenses, and exemplars of practice and securely share them with entities such as state licensing systems, human resources departments, and learning management systems. The project is led by RANDA Solutions, in partnership with the Utah Department of Education, ETS, UPD Consulting, Utah State Board of Education, Digital Promise, BlockFrame, IdRamp, Velocity Career Network, Evernym, IMS Global, Credential Engine, and Fluree.
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UnBlockEd, led by the University of Arizona along with Georgia Institute of Technology, Fluree, and the John N. Gardner Institute, to create an open transfer exchange that will streamline college credit transfer and articulation.
Section 3 Content
Applications were evaluated on the following criteria (please see the
Application Guidelines document (PDF) for detailed definitions):
- Quality of the ecosystem-first design approach
- Quality of the technological approach
- Quality of the management plan and adequacy of resources