Blockchain Innovation Challenge
Section 1 Content
The Blockchain Innovation Challenge made awards totaling $900,000 to ecosystem-first designed approaches driving interoperability, social mobility, and learner control.
The challenge sought technology-enabled solutions that reorient the education and employment ecosystem around the individuals that they aim to serve. It invited teams to articulate a vision and design pilots that address the following 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. We believe that 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 and that the winners will be great pilots focusing on different strategies to leverage blockchain.
The four winners of the Blockchain Innovation Challenge are:
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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
For additional information, email
ebi@acenet.edu.
Section 4 Content
The competition consisted of two phases. Winning teams shared $900,000 in prize money. Phase 1 winners were awarded $150,000 each. All four Phase 1 winning teams demonstrated interoperability of their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and were each awarded $75,000 Phase 2 funding for full implementation of their pilot.
In addition, winners will:
- Receive national recognition through a variety of channels.
- Receive leadership opportunities in community engagement to share lessons learned and best practices.
- Be featured in ACE communications about the Education Blockchain Initiative.
- Play a key role in working with ACE and other stakeholders to develop potential governance standards.
- Receive mentorship from leading technology firms.
- Other opportunities may also be announced.
Thank you to Amazon Web Services for its support of the challenge.