Blockchain Innovation Challenge
Section 1 Content
The Blockchain Innovation Challenge seeks technology-enabled solutions that reorient the education and employment ecosystem around the individuals that they aim to serve.
This challenge invites 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 support learners to find in-demand education in employment-relevant skills to advance economic mobility and to fulfill the promise of higher education?
Section 2 Content
A challenge application will be released in summer 2020. Interested participants can complete an early interest form to receive:
- Notifications of key challenge timeline and deadlines
- Access to community events, including a pre-challenge webinar
- Opportunities for matchmaking to expand their teams and create or refine new ideas
The application will be open to diverse teams of solvers that include educational institutions, training providers, technology platforms, employers, certification and credentialing organizations, and more.
Complete the Form
Section 3 Content
The challenge will ask teams to address three important characteristics of an
ecosystem-first design approach. These are identified in
Connected Impact: Unlocking Education and Workforce Opportunity Through Blockchain with potential for distributed ledger technologies to impact the education and employment ecosystem and enable individuals to achieve social and economic mobility. We expect that all Blockchain Innovation Challenge submissions will address one or more of the following:
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Building community and consensus: Networks of institutions and organizations are important precursors to many blockchain initiatives in education. By cultivating these communities to solve a common challenge and then engineering the blockchain solution as the connective tissue to pull existing components of the ecosystem together, we can reorient around the needs of learners.
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Interoperability and open design: Solutions that leverage open data standards and protocols are critical to the mobility of individuals between the multiple learning and employment domains in their lifetime.
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Data literacy and agency: Advances in distributed ledger technology can inspire new approaches to digital credentials and identifiers that provide individuals with immediate access to their digital data, the ability to control who can view it, and a way for their data to be verified without contacting the issuing parties. This can allow individuals to traverse seamlessly along a lifelong pathway of learning and work. A digital skills and data literacy divide, however, has the potential to compound disparities for traditionally underserved populations and requires additional attention.
Section 4 Content
More information about the Blockchain Innovation Challenge will be released throughout the summer of 2020. To learn more, please indicate your interest through our Early Interest Form.
Complete the Form