BBW25 - Day 1 - From Campus to Consensus: How Universities Can Lead the Web3 Trust Revolution

Well, the conversation around universities and colleges is a perfect segue to our next panel, which is going to be a conversation around how universities can lead the web 3 trust revolution. So please join me in welcoming Len Evanchic who's a professor at my alma mater Boston College, Matt McCormack who's with the higher education practice at Grant Thornton, Soul Nissi who's a co-founder of Chain Letter Labs, also a professor at Bentley University. And this conversation is going to be led by Jan Jamali who's the founder of the American Crypto Academy. Please join me in welcoming them to the stage.

Testing. All right. 5:00 PM. Let's get those folks drifted out in the hallway in here. The party's not over.

All right, welcome everybody. Thank you very much. My name is Jan Jamali. I am the founder of the American Crypto Academy. Tell you a little bit about what we do.

We do web3 education program development as uh for universities, organizations, professionals as well as provide a learning management system around that. Um, we've obviously all seen the commonality in some of the themes today and they're some some of them are a bit similar to what they've been in the years past. And I want to tell a quick story that sort of elucidates this point. A couple years ago in Las Vegas, I got to go to a a pitch dinner with Kevin Oly, right, Mr. Wonderful from like Shark Tank.

I was there with about 50 other crypto enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and they were all giddy to give him a pitch and everybody surrounded him and everyone wanted to know what was like the highest risk or the most daring project that people were working on and everybody sort of went through trying to impress Kevin. Well, a few of us raised our hand and said, "You know what? We're not working on anything particularly risky, but it's the hole in all of your projects. Nobody knows what the hell you're talking about. education, right?

You get wrapped up in terms, acronyms, technical jargon, and lexicon. And you, as an industry as a whole, we all know education has been sort of like the big hole or the big elephant in the room. So, I'm very excited to be leading this panel today talking to three exceptional leaders in education from campus to consensus, how universities can lead the web 3 trust revolution. And as Ian mentioned, I'm going to give them a quick intro and let our panelists uh say a little bit about themselves, but we have Professor Oh, sorry, one second there. We got Professor Len Evans from Boston College.

We got Matt McCormack from Grant Thornton and Soul Nissi from Bentley as well as Chain Letter Labs. Excited to have everybody here today. So, um, Saul, I'm going to start with you and we'll work our way down. Why don't you give the audience a quick intro and tell us a little bit about you and blockchain and education. Thanks, Jan.

Hi, Sisi. Um, Chain Letter Labs, and we're a company that makes uh provides a really fast, easy way to stamp truth onto the blockchain. One of our first products that we're rolling out has to do with digital credentials, and universities are one of our um customers. So, I'm also the executive director of digital marketing at Bentley University. Thank you.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Len Avanchek and I'm a professor at Boston College at the Carol School of Management. Uh let's see at BC at the Carol School. I teach both graduate and undergrad students MBA uh focused as well. And I teach courses on the strategic use of technology and analytics as sort of a core throughout the years.

But then depending on the term and the year, I also teach a course on cyber security management and the business applications of blockchain. uh as it relates to the business applications of blockchain, what I try to stress throughout those courses is that with any new technology and this is the important point, you can either improve current business processes or if the technology is of a certain type, you can create new markets and new businesses basically create something new from that with the new tech as a foundation. And that's why uh blockchain definitely fits into that model. So uh my background also is in administration at other universities here. And the second point would be to understand how this technology is used throughout the university both the research as well as the academic and the administrative.

So look forward to speaking with everyone.

Great. Thank you very much Lynn. So I'm Matt McCormack. with uh Grant Thornton's higher education group. I've uh very excited about this panel today because it's kind of intersection of my two passions, education and blockchain.

So I've been with GT for about five years now, but prior to that uh worked for a couple edte startups for four years in Boston and then before that I was in China for five years helping Chinese students uh go abroad to universities around the globe. So that's kind of my education background and about that time in China is when I discovered Bitcoin and I've been kind of looking my nights and weekends since then trying to figure out is there a currency out there that people actually use as opposed to just holding it hoping the price goes up in dollars. So excited to kind of discuss those today.

Fantastic. Uh so today we're going to cover sort of three core areas and we got questions within that. I'm going to let the panelists um uh provide their opinion on those but we're going to talk about education sort of in general in the space. We're going to talk about credentiing and we're going to talk about new business models that might be emerging. So with that, why don't we get to the first question?

Um I'll ask it in general, then I'll let each one of you um go through and towards the end of the session, I'll save some time for some audience questions as well. But how have schools, universities and even um private organizations um educational organizations responded to the surge popularity and overall demand of crypto or blockchain related skills and with that what are the one or two core challenges that remain in that? So why don't we start with you Saul? Yeah, I think what I've seen is um at least at Bentley that interest sort of waxes and waines uh at the university depending on what's going on with the uh crypto markets quite honestly. Um you know there was a lot of interest in 2020 2021 um the administration was really looking at blockchain was really looking at um how it could be incorporated into some of the classes and then when the crypto crash happened um that sort of dissipated a little bit and then I think what's also happened is AI came in I know AI is one of the themes here and AI has really kind of taken a lot of the air out of the room when it comes to blockchain and So there's a ton of discussion across the university about you know AI, how can the university leverage AI, how should how can students uh understand AI and how AI is really one of the technology of the future.

Blockchain hasn't totally gone away. Um it just doesn't have the same prominence as it had a few years ago. Um and I think that I'm hopeful that that's going to change. There are actually some things of foot at Bentley um that I think are very promising and that show that um you know it hasn't been forgotten.

Thank you very much Len. Okay, so uh as I mentioned just a moment ago, I do teach a course on blockchain for both grads and graduate student undergrads and graduate students. It's an elective and it's overs subscribed and has been for a couple of years. Um what's of note is that the you the ability to understand business as it moves forward is in my opinion very much driven by your ability to understand and leverage technology. And I think that while this course is an elective, there are enough under other courses within the curriculum that sort of at least at Boston College instill that in students that they really need to be cognizant of underlying technology and what it can provide.

And so when they see a course on blockchain or a course on cyber security management and of course on AI, depending on their schedule and everything, they try to get into whatever they can at that term. within the course itself um the what I run what I over the course of years I've said how many of you have been involved in blockchain previously and year few years ago that was basically a blank slate there was very few if any and today I would say the majority of the students in the course either are involved in some startup related work uh in a club there's a Boston club of course uh or perhaps one of their other courses. So I teach at the business school. There are other courses in the computer science department and mathematics department because as you all know blockchain requires that level of technical expertise and expertise and depth which a computer science course can give and I you know is not appropriate for the business school student.

Yeah, I think there's a couple perspectives you could take when looking at this. one is like the students and what are they thinking right and I think you have seen a pretty increased demand and you know students are interested in this type of thing now I think you can look at it from the say professor and academic side and they can look at it from the administration side and I think from the administration side that is probably the lowest on the spectrum like no administrator in higher ed is thinking about blockchain right now they're thinking about budget cuts and federal funding and those kinds of things right and so getting that on their priority list of the president and provost is not very high at the moment I think what the professors are starting to see more and more in that as the students are showing interest in it. But I still think there's a ton of room to grow, especially like there's very few institutions, if any, that are offering like PhDs in blockchain like that doesn't really exist yet. And so I think there's a a lot of ample opportunity for many institutions to continue to be leaders in the forefront, but there uh higher ed is kind of the dinosaur like it doesn't change quickly, right? And so I think that is obviously because this is such a cutting edge thing.

Uh I think as S was saying there's kind of the ups and downs of like oh there's uh artificial intelligence there's blockchain there may be kind of hype things that come along and I don't think blockchain has quite found its footing in higher ed at the moment. If I can say one other thing and that is I think too blockchain and len I'd be curious to hear what you have to say about this has also suffered not suffered but it's been held back a little bit because I don't know if there have been as many faculty who are familiar with blockchain um as are necessary to teach it and so I know that it's difficult sometimes to find faculty who are dedicated to it. I think once again that's changing also as time goes by. Um but I know like five or six years ago there just weren't as many people who were on the faculty side who were as involved with it. So it was hard to find people to teach these classes.

Yeah. Actually I'd like to get sort of the panel's take on this. Um where does this live? Right. you mentioned we don't have a like a doctorate or PhD necessarily or robust programs in blockchain but my experience uh has been to view it as a multidisciplinary topic that it's a bit of history it's a bit of economics it's a bit of computer science it's a bit of business heck it's even a bit of digital art to a degree so where do you see this residing residing and how do you see that playing out

I think it has to be computer science in some sense right because if you truly want to have like if you're going to give someone a, you know, doctorate in blockchain, but they can't code a computer. That's kind of hard to do. And so, I think that's that's where it's probably going to have to end up living, even though the business students right now are probably the ones that are most interested in it.

If I could add that, I think there's no one place. Okay. um thinking about Boston College or other schools in the area that I'm familiar with, there are courses at the business school or in the economics department because when you think blockchain, there's the business applications, there's very much the financial, cryptocurrency, stable coin, genius act, all of the things that were, you know, all the new things over the last course of the last 12 months that's driving a lot of the economics of course development as well and I've seen economics professors you know who are curious about what I'm doing and also finance professors within the business school who teach a separate finance course on blockchain and stable coin the idea of you know what that all means really is interesting because blockchain is a separate payment rail and I that's a finance issue there's also the options issues as it relates to hedging and all of that on blockchain which is very much finance. I cover the business applications in the same way the computer science folks I was speaking with one a few days ago is working on some research related to the security of the encryption algorithm within blockchain and how that can be extended for other for the next 20 years. clearly not something I'm going to get involved with uh in with my MBA students or is the finance professor going to get involved with.

So I see it as finance, economics, strategy and of course computer science. There are, although not at Boston College, I've also worked with some professors in the arts and humanities, uh, more specifically music schools where they're trying to figure out how all the royalties that are being worked on, basically a royalty payment system. And so music students are not well, not surprisingly, very very interested in that going forward. So music schools are also while they don't have a course are bringing folks in for guest lectures to say here's what's possible.

All right. Fantastic. You know I think that is a great segue to our second question. You know we were talking about you know where does this live in terms of which department and uh what types of uh credentials maybe somebody might have. So let's let's talk about that in in general.

Um how like digital credentials themselves. How do you view the role and impact of blockchain blockchain verified digital credentials in educa in higher education and in training in general and professional training?

Soul.

Yeah. So I think that like a lot of things in the world digital credentials are going digital. I mean right now um a lot of institutions still issue paper. I think that's going to change and I think if that's changing then blockchain makes a lot of sense for the technology platform to underly it generally it's less expensive it's cheaper uh it's more open it's more durable right if you have a certain company that's issuing a digital credential and it goes out of business what happens to that credential that's not a problem if you do it on the blockchain and so I think blockchain you know people ask you know what is blockchain good for that's what I hear a lot from people outside. Well, this to me is like tailor made for blockchain.

Um, and so I think while this change is happening, while we're going from paper to digital, this is an opportune time for blockchain to really be a solution to uh a problem that really exists out there. You know, I think I I read the other day that 40% of résumés have false information on them. That's something blockchain can change. 30% of LinkedIn profiles have false information. So, it's really a much more efficient way to take that credential information and then be able to verify it on the other end.

Awesome. Thank you, Len or Matt. Go ahead.

Give me the honor. So,

okay.

No, I would say uh I think there's a if we really think what higher education is, right? Um, you know, I would assume some folks in this room have gone to higher ed. Like you spend a lot of money, you get a piece of paper. That's what you get at the end essentially. It's a credential, right?

And certain of those pieces of paper people are going to look at and be like, "Oh, wow. You went there." Right? There's there's certain ones that get that more of a reaction factor. It gets you the job interview kind of thing, right?

And so I think uh to Soul's point like higher ed has had a monopoly on those credentials for such a long time. And certain schools are more desirable than others. And I think that you're going to start seeing uh some let's call it more innovative universities, right? Not the top 25, but there's probably a middle section there. They're going to be willing to lean in and say, "Hey, we are willing to do these more digital type credentials, right?

There's things like credly or kind someone's been trying to figure this out for a long time." And I think that blockchain is something that's going to make that a bit more uh acceptable in the long run. And I think you're going to see some higher education institutions actually willing to do that uh here in the coming years. But it's it's going to take time to change and get them to understand the benefit behind it. and uh sort of following a couple of points that were just made.

Um I'm not going to I'm reluctant to say the school because if I get it wrong, I'm going to really hear from them later, but a private school went out of business last year. And uh all the folks who had spent time there and were had graduated or were about to graduate, they basically stopped answering the phone and stopped responding to email. And had their certificates and for specific courses or their diplomas been available on blockchain, the fact that the company, it was a private educational company, had gone out of business, that's a shame. And so but so be it as far as the student perspective is concerned. The other is that while we're talking more about diplomas here, if you fine-tune it a little bit or slice and dice it a little bit more, it's per course as well.

And there's very much I've seen a lot of activity in that as well where individual courses can now be certified and that leads to another change in the business model for perhaps later. Um, and I found it also interesting that it's not just the largest schools that are looking at digital certificates or diplomas, but the University of Rome a few years ago switched to a digital made I don't I assume if they still have paper, but also their diplomas are available via blockchain and they said they're saving tens of thousands of dollars by issuing the certificates in a digital form. If I can add a point just to what you're saying there like there there's a database run by the federal government called the iPads database which is a list of all the institutions across the country that numbers been getting smaller every year and it's going to continue to cascade more and more. There's what's called the demographic cliff that started this year technically in higher ed where people stopped having kids about 18 years ago or didn't have as many and so there's a lot less students going to college and there's going to continue to be a large number of schools closing every single year and I think to your point if I graduated from that institution like can I still get my transcript like what happened to that where is it and you know there's ways we could do that on the blockchain

yeah that leads up to a good quick followup before our third topic because I want to get your guys's opinion on where do you think the push is going to come from Right? Is it coming from the registars's office? Is it coming from like platforms like LinkedIn? Is it coming from employers? Or is it also coming from like cost savings initiatives in the face of some really changing realities for higher education

and I'll I'll open the floor to that.

I think it's going to come from the registars's office. Quite honestly, I think speaking to registars, they know that they have to make the change um and they know that there cost savings um that they can get from that change. And so I do think that they'll be listening to other pressures. They'll be listening to students who are saying are you really still just giving me a paper credential. Um so it'll be part of the university experience.

But I think ultimately it's the registars who are going to to lead that change.

Yeah, I think in terms of credentials will probably register or just the idea of like cost savings will be kind of the reason why we would be willing to do something like that. I think they would tack innovation on as a a nice to have, but people are going to make decisions based on financials in some sense. Uh, and I think that we've talked a little bit so over the years of like just like stable coins and taking tuition payments and those like there's there's ways they might be able to reduce fees and make a little more money at the top. Education is a business, right? And so I think those will be kind of the drivers as opposed to, oh, we think blockchain is such this innovative idea.

That'll be a plus, but the main will be financial.

All set. All right. So I think that's all that's that's a good segue to our third sort of topic. Um you we're talking about what market forces might drive this. So what types of new learning educa new learning business models and new education models do you see emerging from this uh intersection of blockchain and AI?

Okay. So uh I guess I've mentioned that already but thank you for it's like um I sort of see two sort of at a let me speak to that at first a very high level and then maybe a more pragmatic day in dayout level at a very high level it's been stepping back it's been maybe 20 years since the first conversations were held about what was called the open university or the meta university. This was well well be well before the name change of Facebook the or other global universities where there was the idea that given the right administrative overhead and overlay it would be possible to create a degree that would be re you know appreciated in the world by pulling together courses and materials and research from multiple universities and multiple non-universities. ities and create a degree. And I've again I can give you a reference to one from 20 years ago.

And we've seen some models in that respect with something like edex from a dozen years ago, well perhaps about a dozen or plus years ago which was done as a consortium and then went private uh was sold and uh Corsera again now private well very much private and public actually I mean meaning non-consortion now and so it's a private it's a publicly traded firm to be clear uh as is the edex environment But blockchain, I think, gives us the opportunity to revisit that and actually have it be a nonentralized educational environment with an appreciated degree because individual courses, completion of courses, grade that can be all done via DAO's if properly done. And that's one sort of high level at a more pragmatic is remember a university is there to teach but given our wonderful universities in this area and throughout the US of course and the world there's also the other emphasis in universities is research and a major part of research is publishing uh there's there's funding there's actual execution of the research and then for all professors who are interested in tenure track there's very much the publishing aspect publishing is very much something that is today being quite changed quite influenced by the availability of blockchain. So I see that is another model change going forward.

Awesome. Thank you. So did you want to add to that?

Yeah, I think that you know the way that universities even can fund themselves will change.

Yeah. You know, I think that some will start to accept uh crypto. We've already started to see that they'll accept crypto from their alumni. So, not only is there going to be a change in the way that um information is disseminated, but I think it's going to change the way that the universities are administered also.

Yeah, 100%. Can you guys give me your kind of thoughts on that? I know Matt, you want to say something else?

Yeah. Well, and I think that that ties into the both topics here. I think again there's different perspectives to look at the different stakeholders, right? So there's students, there's professors and there's faculty. Students uh again I think the whole thing that whether it's edex or these mukes or like someone is going to crack that nut eventually of like how do we have a decentralized credential that anyone can learn from Boston to Africa to Beijing like how can we make sure that they're all getting the same quality education and it's not linked learning where you like hit play and then put it in the other window and get your little certificate right like it needs to be better than that.

Uh so I think that's kind of from the student perspective. I think from the professor perspective, right? And we won't fall into this hole here, but like H scores and just like research and there there's a lot to be done there because the world has been driven forward by professors doing great research and that has to continue, right? So, we need to figure out a way to do that kind of in the blockchain sphere. But I think from the professors and the governance or sorry, from the administration and the governance, uh there's a lot of administration that's just kind of bloated at this point.

There's a lot of people there and like what value is being contributed and I think there's uh ways you're going to start seeing more efficiencies. I mean, it's kind of been spurred by the federal government over the last 10 months or so. Um, I think you're going to see, like we talked about earlier, I think the financial like, can we use blockchain to make this simpler? Can we use AI to make this simpler? Like, can we learn faster?

Like what if you think about for-profit corporations, right? Like getting them to use the internet, right? 20, 30 years ago, they weren't all using the internet. Now, if you don't have email, like you can't be a company, right? Like I think the same thing is going to slowly happen with blockchain and artificial intelligence.

and you'll see that in higher ed eventually, but it'll it'll take some time.

Awesome. Thank you. Um, we've got just over two minutes left, so I just wanted to leave a minute or two for any questions that uh the audience might have for our panelists today.

Yes.

Thank you very much for the mic. removing endowments from my question. Do you see uh universities going the way that many companies are going where they're using uh treasury management from a crypto perspective or bitcoin on their balance sheets uh beyond saw what you just described and how that can change? Uh short answer I would say a very small amount like we're doing a lot of budget model reorgs in higher ed these days but you're uh like like their endow like like their endowment right their endowment isn't 100% crypto so same thing internally like what their day-to-day month-to-month budgets it would be a very small amount if anything in the short term from my perspective at least I don't know if anyone has different opinions I mean from my what I've seen I think um universities are stepping very gingerly into that um you know I I don't I don't know if there are any that have actually are actively doing it, but I'm sure that they're starting to think about it a little bit. So, yeah.

Awesome. We have time for one more.

So, in addition to the more credential proof, so I went to MITS did my wife. We live in Miami now. We don't encounter a lot of alumni, but we'll routinely encounter someone on LinkedIn who's did a weekend online certificate course at MIT and list themselves as an alum. And this on LinkedIn, it's not technically fraud, but I would think the universities would have an incentive to preserve their brand a little more. And how can blockchain kind of help with that?

Yeah, I think that's exactly what blockchain can help with because you can have a blockchain system that allows you as the viewer of that profile to see exactly the type of degree that they received, right? Whether it's on LinkedIn or whether it's on some other social media and you can see that they got a certificate from a two-day course at MIT versus, you know, an undergraduate degree of BS. And so I think that does help the university. It helps the general public because you know exactly the credential that the person's received. So that's one of the big problems I think that blockchain can help to solve.

All right. Thank you very much. Uh and that brings us to the end of the time. If you guys have additional questions, our panelists will be available real quick after the uh after the session here. But thank you very much.

Appreciate you all and have a great week here at Boston Blockchain Week.