6.4.1 D ESCRIPCIÓN Y S INTAXIS

Interview with Professor Soulla Louca and Professor George Giaglis

The University of Nicosia (UNIC) has claimed a number of ‘world firsts’ in its commitment to maximising the potential of the blockchain in education51_{. UNIC claims it is the first} university to:

— accept Bitcoin for tuition for any degree program at the university (October 2013); — teach a university-level course on cryptocurrency, delivered as a MOOC called

‘Introduction to Digital Currencies’ (January 2014);

— offer an accredited academic degree program – a Master of Science in Digital Currency – taught online in English (March 2014 with first students graduated in june 2016);

— issue academic certificates onto the Bitcoin blockchain, using its own in-house software platform (September 2014).

Discussions with Antonis Polemitis, CEO of UNIC at the ASU GSV Summit, 2017 and a subsequent interview with Blockchain Initiative coordinators Professor Soulla Louca and Professor George Giaglis indicate that UNIC considers Blockchain technology as a cornerstone of its strategy52_{, and a point of differentiation from other higher education} institutions. Although UNIC’s introductory free MOOC on Digital Currencies is not unique53_{, it is positioned as the first course of the MSc in Digital Currency. Components} of the MSc are in turn repackaged into blockchain professional certification programs which translate into CPD and ECTSs.

In September 2017, the eighth version of the MOOC will be launched. To date, the MOOC has attracted students from 80 different countries and has shown good completion rates. Course content is hosted by UNIC, and continues to evolve because of the university’s networks in the global teaching community. The Blockchain Research Centre is positioned as a world class centre on emerging technologies, which will integrate, expand the scope and strengthen the inter-disciplinary research already carried out in this evolving field.

Bitcoin to facilitate payment of tuition fees, admissions and access

When UNIC introduced the Masters in digital currency, one of the first things it did was to allow students to pay in Bitcoin. Both Professors Louca and Giaglis identify this early decision as having significant advantages for the university and students:

— It was perfectly logical to allow students joining a digital currency program that is taught online to pay for their studies with a digital currency. This immediately demonstrated UNIC’s commitment to embrace the new technology and its affordances.

— It enabled the Masters course to attract a truly multinational cohort of motivated students, many of whom are from developing countries. Foreign students are normally associated with a legacy of pseudo-remittance cases. UNIC’s ‘pay as you go’ system for tuition fees mean that for instance African students are paying for

(51) _{See DigitalCurrency.unic.ac.cy}

(52) _{UNIC’s role as a Blockchain innovator in academia has also been recognised by Blockchain industry} publications, such as CoinDesk (2016) and the Merkle (2017). See https://www.coindesk.com/the-global- universities-embracing-cryptocurrency

their fees on a monthly basis, and avoiding remittance charges associated with traditional bank clearing which may amount to up to 20% of the tuition fees54_. — Rebuilding the system for issuing certificates and verifying credentials is not

necessarily going to solve day-to-day problems for students such as cashflows or administration costs. Being able to pioneer a payment system without an intermediary payment provider adds value to both parties in the transaction. UNIC incentivizes its target students to pay in Bitcoin over Bitpay, its own payment gateway, by offering a 5% discount over net fees.

— Helping someone pay and going the extra mile from a registrar point of view also increases access to higher education: a refugee was given a scholarship for the programme and this in turn led to him securing residency status.

Issuing and authenticating Certificates using a Blockchain

Blockchain certification is one way of bridging the gap between traditional university research practices and the need for pragmatic solutions for the market. UNIC has commissioned its own development team to issue and authenticate certificates using the Blockchain, using the Blockcerts open source standard – its relationship with MIT Media Lab dates back to 2015.

The challenge many universities face is not just admissions offices wary of the fraud associated with taking payments from ‘international students’, but also long-standing problems of higher education institutions tampering with the numbers of student cohorts. In certain countries people are prepared to pay a bribe for a semi-authentic seal of authenticity from some central authority. There is also no current registrar SaaS that can readily verify identity.

UNIC describes the process for issuing and authenticating certificates using a blockchain in a web link55_{. All the MOOC certificates are being issued using a public blockchain; in} June 2017 testing commenced on a system to publish all diplomas using a blockchain by October 2017 and provide software tools so people can confirm the authenticity of certificate through the use of language and other applications. UNIC remains part of the Blockcerts consortium and committed to open standards, but is now using a variety of tools to improve the user-facing interface layers.

Figure 25 below is an illustration of an index of certificates:

(54) _{Transaction payment charges to Cyprus are also high because of the modularity of payments.}

(55) _{See https://digitalcurrency.unic.ac.cy/free-introductory-mooc/self-verifiable-certificates-on-the-bitcoin-} blockchain/academic-certificates-on-the-blockchain/

Figure 21: University of Nicosia Index of Certificates notarised on the Blockchain (excerpt)

The need for a standard for certification: scalability and portability

The challenge with issuing of credentials using a blockchain is not the technology – that may well be the most manageable part of the equation. If we want to look at increased widespread applications of the technology – for instance, integrating certificate verification into HR software or using the technology to facilitate the seamless recognition and transfer of credits between universities – the problem that has yet to be solved is the transfer of metadata.

Professor Giaglis notes: “There are difficulties if you want to optimise what you do on the Blockchain and do it at scale. It is one thing to develop technology that publishes PDF certificates; it is altogether more complicated to do have technology that supports full degree transcripts and diploma supplements. Nevertheless, this is doable, and doable now. The real challenge is to scale this technology across higher education institutions so

it gets integrated with internal systems – this is now not dependent on technology, but on the propensity of universities to exchange information; and for employers and other interested parties to validate the authenticity of a certificate without having to contact the university itself in the first place. A student from Bangladesh University should be able to demonstrate that a certificate is authentic and verifiable without having to contact the country that issued the certificate in the first place.”

Mr Polemitis notes: “It would be hugely valuable if high schools around the world had some common standard for accreditation and recognition. We cannot have 40 standards on a blockchain. How does this become useful to higher education - which is being fed by secondary education? How can we get everyone to subscribe to the same standard? If any one institution like ours is doing it - it is limited; if a nation state or all higher education institutions and schools in a country come on board – that would be very useful”.

Professor Giaglis opines that there is currently not enough traction on Blockcerts to make it the de facto ‘standard’ for blockchain in education – although UNIC continued to support it, and develop applications on the open standard. “It may well be that MIT has different priorities at this juncture as the early momentum in the community site appears to have slowed down. It is not in UNIC’s interest to develop closed applications, independent of the open spirit of Blockcerts. But we do need to move at pace. Sooner or later our paths will hopefully converge and there will be shared experiences which will enable UNIC to tunnel back into Blockcerts as the de facto open standard for the blockchain in education”.

Having the CEO as a champion of blockchain means that UNIC is inevitably an advocate for the affordances of the technology. UNIC believes that its commitment to the strategic use of the Blockchain may soon be mirrored in other institutions, and in sectors beyond education, with a network effect that will impact industry – the “real market”: there are some doubts that higher education alone can lead the charge to make blockchain technology sustainable in the very short term.

The corollary is that if people in complementary industries can interoperate, there will be inevitable benefits to education. UNIC pointed to the need for a standard, for instance, that could authenticate comments on the Blockchain. Such agreement would lead to network dynamics. The hope is that a de facto open standard will emerge – despite the efforts of enterprise to primary go for closed, proprietary solutions. When people see real life benefits in the implementation of a technology, it is inevitable that a set of commonly agreed metadata will be exchanged.