Blockchain in Higher Education: The Research Summarized

The research I undertook for the thesis of my fourth MA revealed that blockchain is already disrupting many industries and financial processes. Its impact on/disruption of HE is assured. In 2018, it was only the nature, speed, and degree of that impact/disruption that was unclear. This research stratified the discourse into six highly related subtopics that reveal the interests and predictions of educational and technological experts regarding the nature and degree of blockchain’s disruption of HE.

Through the analysis, meta-findings were detectable: the equalization of the user-provider/buyer-supplier dynamic may likely prove to be blockchain’s most impactful meta-consequence for social and economic structures and their foundations. Blockchain represents significant affordances but is an element within a trinity of disruptive technologies – the others being the IoT and, perhaps most societally significant, Artificial Intelligence. 

Because democratizing, disintermediating, intelligent technologies are disrupting society variously, blockchain and all other technologies that enable this disruption merit inclusion in the curricula of HE – in both STEM and humanities subjects.