 Hello, my name is Wünver Betigem. I work at the University of Leuven. I used to be the Vice-President Research of Eden and I'm happy today here to talk with Anthony Camilleri, who is talking about blockchain technology. Anthony, maybe you can first introduce yourself. Hi Wün, thanks for the invite first of all. Essentially, my background is as a consultant in educational innovation and research. And for the past year and a half I have actually been investigating the potentials of this new technology called blockchain and looking at the different ways it might affect education and then also using that information to advise governments around Europe in what approach they should take towards these new emerging areas. Okay, sounds interesting for the next coming questions. But maybe to start off, how do you define blockchain technology yourself? Okay, simply enough a blockchain is a special kind of database that is decentralized, unhackable and undestroyable. More importantly though, blockchain is a way for people to transact between each other online without the need for any intermediary or central party. Okay, I think many people know blockchain technology as a technology which is behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and so. But we are here today to talk about education and higher education in particular. How do you see blockchain technology related to the work that we are doing in higher education? Is that a new learning technology or how do you define that in this context? So it is not per se a technology for teaching and learning. Blockchain is a technology for storing and for transacting value. However, if we look at the education area, what is education if not about transferring value in the form of knowledge? And in education we have a lot of different ways of representing that knowledge. Probably the easiest way is the credential. The certificate you get at the end of the course, which isn't really just a piece of paper. It is a representation of all the educational value you have gotten. A completely different example might be journal papers. Your citation count as a researcher is actually a measure of the scientific value you have created. We have other measures of value such as patents, such as copyrights, and we could continue. So when you start thinking of blockchain like this as a way that helps you transact and store this value in a better way than today, then you start seeing how it could be very interesting and how it connects to some of the fundamentals of education. Can we go a bit deeper on the value in credentials? Is that already happening in universities and how does it go? At the moment this of course has happened for centuries at universities. You mean the certificates? Credentials. But a credential today is effectively a piece of paper that says you know this amount of information. You take that credential to an employer, they look at the piece of paper, and effectively they will often essentially call back the institution and ask them, is this real and what does this represent and what does it mean. It's sufficient to say this is not an ideal situation. So where blockchain comes in is that blockchain by allowing you to create a database that is uneditable and unhackable and it's mathematically provable to be so, you can then actually take that credential to an employer and it becomes automatically recognizable, automatically verifiable, which significantly increases the speed of the transactions. Also because a blockchain is a distributed database that is stored by many parties instead of by one central party, even if the institution that awarded it is completely destroyed by an earthquake or another natural disaster, the proof of your certificate will still exist. You can still prove the knowledge you know and that certificate will continue to exist. So you will never lose your certificate anymore. You will never lose your certificate and you will never need the intervention of the person who issued it to actually prove it. And you're now talking about let's say well-established institutions that are also in that blockchain technology, but what if students have like non-formal learning certificates or maybe other certificates that are not issued by higher education institutes. Is that also a possibility that we could imagine or is that far away? So that isn't a possibility you need to imagine. That is something that already exists. So before I continue I have to say that I don't represent or promote any of these companies, but for example you could go to accredible.com right now, sign up for an account and issue a blockchain verified credential for any purpose from participation in a seminar to participation in a course through to a full degree. And basically all it requires you to do is sign up and actually start issuing those credentials. Oh, I'm not sure if I understand it right. Does that mean that I'm working at the University of Leuven? I can go to that website and I can get my certificate from the University of Leuven? No, it means that if I and Tony decide to offer a course in blockchain studies and I want to issue verified certificates to my students, I can go and issue them. Okay, I got it wrong, so thank you. You were also talking about values in your research papers, journal papers, and so how does that go? Okay, first of all I should state my real political alliances here. And simply enough I'm one of the people who believes in open access to scientific publications and I believe especially that research paid for with public money should be open and free. At the moment we have a different system. We have a system that is controlled by three to four major publishers. Now the thing is the internet already made publishers the need for publishers to evaporate two decades ago. I mean I can press one button and it's published to the world. So why do we still use publishers? And the reason we still use publishers is because they still control the ledger, the database of who published what where and who cited who where. And those citations are extremely valuable because they're what essentially determine your career as an academic. I mentioned before that blockchain is technology that gets rid of the intermediaries. So imagine if you could run this database just the same as it's run today with the same set of rules. But without publishers. But without any company controlling it. It would be run by the libraries of Europe or the research centers of Europe together. And that's what blockchain makes possible in this area. So it's open publications without publishers? Yes, open publications, open citations without the need for publishers run by the research foundations themselves. Great. This morning in your keynote speech we're also mentioning one of the possibilities with blockchain technology is smart contracts. I was quite interested in that application, let's say. Can you elaborate a little bit on smart contracts in the context of higher education institutions? Okay, first I'm going to explain what a smart contract is. So with a regular contract, me and you will agree on a certain set of things. And after the contract is signed, each of us as parties need to execute those conditions. Essentially we have to do what we say. A smart contract. Just to interrupt you, does that mean that for instance a learning contract between an institution and a student might be one of these contracts? Yes, that could be. So for example a very simple one in a typical Erasmus agreement. I will say that, I can say that if you study these five ECTS at another institution, when you come back as long as you pass, I will recognize them as part of your degree. The thing is, I've said I will do that, but it doesn't necessarily mean I will do that. The fact that I've signed the contract doesn't make it true. All it means is I've committed to make it true. A smart contract is slightly different. A smart contract is a contract written as code and put on a blockchain. And remember that once it's put on the blockchain, it cannot be deleted and effectively it cannot be changed. So once I've made that commitment, the contract will run on the blockchain as if it's running on a computer and it becomes self-executing. Which means as soon as the conditions which are coded into the contract occur, the contract will execute. In our example, the second I get the right set of grades from the institution I am visiting. The contract would be monitoring the grade system of that university. It will automatically add them to my prospectus at the first one. And once we've written as a smart contract, it will just happen. No person needs to intervene to execute it. But it also works the other way around, I think. A contract always has two parties. What you're describing now is let's say what happens at the institutional side. But if you're a learner and you have a learning contract with the university, then it also means that you have responsibilities as a learner to execute the contract. Absolutely. So it all depends on the conditions. So I can tell you where these are being used typically at the moment. And the thing is not surprisingly, the area that's generating the most excitement is actually payment of incentives via smart contracts. So I can award you a scholarship as a student, as a funder, and the contract signed by the funder and the student. And the money is already committed by the funder the second the contract is signed. But it will only be released to the student if and when the student hits certain grades. Now because the contract is signed, that money is already the students provided they hit the grade. The funder can't change their mind later. But if the student doesn't hit the grade, he can't come with like a hundred stories why reasons why not the money will be automatically returned to the funder. You could imagine performance incentives for teachers even say based on citation counts, student evaluations that happen the same way. So basically instead of let's say moving all of these up to committees with not just the inefficiencies of committees, but the inefficiencies, the let's say difference in decisions, the lack of harmonization in some areas to corruption that can happen in these, you just code the rules into the contract and all of this automatically happens. This all sounds very, let's say, fantastic to me. But is it already happening in universities or higher education institutes here in Europe or elsewhere in the world? Okay, so I always talk about what is possible in blockchain. And at some level a lot of this is already happening. But it's happening at extremely simple, extremely, let's say, extremely starting areas. Blockchain effectively is still an unproven technology. And one thing I would warn anyone watching this is that there are literally thousands of startups that are in the process of raising money to build blockchain applications. And it's pretty much standard on the pitch deck to say that you will do absolutely everything with blockchain and it will change the world of blockchain. While that might be possible many years from now, a lot of the applications are simpler. So some of the simple applications that already exist that are already funded in terms of smart contracts are in fact these types of ones where funders give an amount and it's released to students based under certain conditions. Another simple one I've seen an example of is funding given to a student based on attendance. So if you log in 10 times to the learning management system and like each of the modules your funding will be released. So it's an extremely simple implementation of it. But because of the way it's implemented, it's a harbinger of things to come. But that's still a few million lines of code away. Okay, yeah. I think there is still well being myself involved in higher education. I can imagine all these applications like you say but I still think that well probably we have a long way to go before we're there yet. We have a very very long way to go and the most important thing I would say over here is that because blockchain is such a young technology it's pretty much impossible to say what the youth face will be. If we do this interview again in three years I'm really sure it'll be a completely different set of use cases. The first researchers that let's say were sending emails of the internet did not in a million years imagine that the main use of it today would be Facebook and Netflix. So what we can say at the moment is that blockchain chains some of the fundamental value propositions of the internet as we know it. That means it will change things but where it will take us specifically at the moment these are just scenarios. Okay, I think we have to summarize this here. But is there any particular message you would like to bring to the Eden community? If it's within while you mentioned within three years we will probably have another interview. Is there anything that you would give us as a society and as an association I mean as a message? I would actually make a two-part message. First of all blockchain has been overhyped beyond any reasonable level and actually it is an area where there are not hundreds but thousands of bad actors working. And unfortunately that at the moment especially gives the entire technology a little bit of a bad smell. That said the reason everybody is jumping on this bandwagon is because they've seen a new Gold Rush. There is something quite valuable there and for every real serious actor there are 10 charlatans trying to jump on that bandwagon. But the other thing I would argue to Eden is that it is the role of education to actually lead to this charge. Most people I speak to in education and most people I've spoken to at this conference are interested in finding 20 reasons why it might not work or why it might not revolutionize education or taking a wait-and-see attitude. And at least the way I was taught to think of the scientific method is ask questions, doubt everything, pile means, but then go ahead and build experiments to prove it one way or another. And especially in a technology that gives value to knowledge which isn't that what we're all supposed to be about. I would just argue effectively experiment as much as you can, move fast and break things. So be a bit less reluctant and adopt the new technologies and also blockchain. And maybe then come back in three years from now and see where we are at that moment. Well, not adopt. Test, experiment, see what can be done. Then we can decide on adoption later. But it's an exciting, exciting new technology. Let's figure out what it can do to actually really help learners. Okay, thank you. That's an important message for us and thank you for being here with this interview. My pleasure. Okay.