Blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin, may be just what the global education industry needs — a fresh approach to improving student access, lowering costs and making course material more relevant in the real world.
Some of the world’s sharpest minds are already focused on ways to use blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, to improve education outcomes. They’re talking about shaking up an industry that has sometimes shunned innovation.
“Consider how [blockchain] technology could be used to incubate a democratized and agile ecosystem for Edtech,” says Phaedra Boinodiris, author of IBM’s DeveloperWorks Blog. “This ecosystem could serve everyone from coal miners struggling to become re-trained in solar energy to elementary school students in urban cities learning the basic tenets of topics like design thinking, quantum computing, and cyber defense.”
At ODEM.IO we’re using the blockchain to build the first On-Demand Education Marketplace. The idea is to spawn a collaborative, interactive platform to empower students to engage with top academics in the creation of high-quality onsite educational experiences at a reasonable cost.
Our platform, which may become the Airbnb of global education, leverages the Ethereum blockchain to simplify the logistics of delivering short-and-medium-term academic experiences. It brings students and teachers together directly. Good-bye to costly intermediaries. Hello to face-to-face teaching and interaction.
What’s exciting about using the blockchain is that we’re creating a whole new community of students, educators and service providers. Our aim is to foster an innovative economic model that will use machine-and-blockchain-based learning. The ODEM platform will adapt to constantly offer the highest-quality education at the lowest cost.
Overall, the platform will give students and other buyers of education more control and power to customize their course material. They will also have more bargaining power in the form of information about their education alternatives.
The ODEM platform uses its own secure, digital token and payment system to simplify cross border transactions and to incentivize university professors based on the popularity and timeliness of their course material. We plan to begin a public crowdsale on February 17 to fund further development of the platform.
We’ve already made great strides because we have a great partner in education.
We’re building the ODEM.IO platform in cooperation with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Excelorators Inc. For more than five years Excelorators has been crafting high-quality, short-term educational experiences for international students and foreign executives at top U.S. universities and corporate campuses.
And it’s important to note that Excelorators already has a network of more than 200 professors and education industry service providers lined up to spearhead adoption of the ODEM platform.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more with you about Excelorators and other exciting partnerships.
Stay tuned.
CEO,
ODEM.IO
For more information about ODEM, see https://odem.io/