The number of higher-educational institutions offering bitcoin-, blockchain- or fintech-related instruction is constantly growing. CoinFox reviews some of the most important educational initiatives.

Earlier we wrote about bitcoin’s popular image, focusing on the fact that the cryptocurrency remains unknown and rather misunderstood outside of its own community. Education is one of the keys to introducing bitcoin to the general public, systematically, and even with a critical eye.

A number of top notch North American universities, such as MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and NYU have been teaching bitcoin and blockchain since 2014, while  other business schools have ventured in fintech education and research just recently.

In general, bitcoin- and blockchain-oriented courses adopt one of the two approaches: either they train coders and developers, teaching the technology underlying bitcoin and blockchain and enabling students to design bitcoin- and blockchain-powered applications, or they focus on the history of money, economy, value production and consider bitcoin as one of its most recent phenomena.

However important bitcoin and blockchain education is, it is also rather expensive. Back in September Brave New Coin wrote that NYU Stern’s two day course Digital Currency: Revolution in Money and Payments cost US $3,600 and a ten-week course at Stanford cost US $3,960. Most recently THE MERKLE argued that blockchain education events were “quite expensive” as “courses on blockchain education and development cost close over US $4,000.”

MOOCs

That is why bitcoin and blockchain Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained popularity among the public.

One of the most successful initiatives of that kind is the Introduction to Digital Currencies online course launched in 2013 by the University of Nicosia in Cyprus (UNIC).

Being the first free MOOC on digital currencies and the first course in UNIC’s English-taught MSc in Digital Currency program, the course is led by Andreas Antonopoulos and Antonis Polemitis and covers “both a technical overview of decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin, as well as their broader economic, legal and financial context.” Those who succeed in completing the course, get their certificates issued and signed on blockchain.

This academic year, the course started in February with sessions on history of money and the introduction to digital currencies, continued with four classes on mainstream and alternative uses of both bitcoin and blockchain, and now, in April, will focus on the relations between digital currencies, central banking, financial, regulatory and tax institutions, as well as on the role of digital currencies in the developing world, and their place in innovation. 615 students from 76 countries have registered for the course, most of them being male (89.9%) aged between 25 and 44. The completion rate of the course is 20.81%.

Apart from teaching the Introduction to Digital Currencies, Andreas Antonopoulos has written Mastering Bitcoin, a guide translated into nine languages other than English by volunteers and now freely available for downloading.

Another free cryptocurrency course, namely Princeton University’s Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies is available at Coursera. Taught by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten and Andrew Miller, the seven-week course offers a general introduction to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, as well as the conceptual foundation needed “to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network.”

Princeton Bitcoin textbook, the first complete draft of which became freely available in February 2016, is among the important outcomes of the course.

The Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria discusses bitcoin from the point of view of history of money and the currencies’ potential for societal innovation during its MOOC Money and Society. Launched for the first time in 2015, the MOOC will be open for students again in the end of August 2016.

On-Campus Courses

On-campus bitcoin and blockchain education is spreading rapidly, as well.

To name but a few initiatives, New York University’s Law School and Stern School of Business launched The Law and Business of Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies classes back in September 2014. Duke University’s Campbell Harvey taught Innovation and Cryptoventures, a course dedicated to disruptive technologies and their implication on future business models, during the spring 2015.

In addition to being the home of the Simon Fraser Bitcoin Club which advertises itself as “the public’s go-to for expertise on Bitcoin in Canada, and particularly at the university level,” Simon Fraser University (SFU) is currently considering placing BTMs on campus, as well as accepting bitcoin at its bookstore and dining services. One of the higher educational institutions publicly open to the digital currency, SFU has  recently hosted the renowned peer-to-peer theorist Michel Bauwens, the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation) and the Head of Research for Commons Transition.

During his public lecture entitled From Proprietary Systems to Open Value Regimes: Collaborative Economies and Blockchain Technologies Bauwens discussed alternatives to the neoliberal economic policies, including networked forms of production which offer “a range of new, open value practices in which communities themselves decide what value is, how it is produced, and how it should be redistributed.” Bauwens paid particular attention to the blockchain technology and its potential “to unseat monopoly forms of economic valuation and market-based incentive systems.” 

While Bauwens' lecture is the most recent of peer-to-peer-, blockchain- or bitcoin-related events hosted by SFU, during the summer semester of 2015 David Andolfatto, Vice President, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, included bitcoin into the list of main topics covered by his Money and Banking course.

Another important cryptocurrency educational initiative is hosted by MIT Media Lab. The Digital Currency Initiative is aimed at “pushing the boundaries of knowledge around cryptocurrency and its underlying distributed ledger technology” and “clarifying the real-world impact of these technologies.”

Launched a year ago, the Digital Currency Initiative considers its area of research novel and significant. Its goals are as follows: to conduct “research and engage more students on digital currency topics that address questions about security, stability, scalability, privacy, and economics,” to convene “governments, nonprofits, and the private sector to research and test concepts that have high social impact,” and to provide “evidence-based research to support existing and future policy and standards.”

An important result of the Digital Currency Initiative launch were two courses taught during the fall semester of 2015, namely Blockchain Technologies: Decentralize all the Things and Future Commerce ~ Rebooting Markets, Money, Transactions & Security.

The first course posited as its objective to teach students “how to work with digital currencies like bitcoin” and provide “an understanding of how to use this technical skill to impact the economics, privacy, and interoperability that are driving the adoption of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.” The second addressed bitcoin, blockchain and digital currencies in general as examples for one of its main subject areas, namely Future of Money. 

Last but not least, Stanford University offered a course and an associated lab course dedicated to cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and smart contracts entitled Bitcoin and Crypto Currencies. The course, launched also in 2015, covered “the technical aspects of crypto-currencies, blockchain technologies, and distributed consensus.”

Stanford continues to offer bitcoin and blockchain instruction, most recently with its lab course Bitcoin Engineering dedicated to building bitcoin-enabled applications (January–March 2016).

Alternative platforms

Education is not restricted to a classroom or a MOOC and does not necessarily need the backing of any university. 

A non-profit educational platform Khan Academy, for instance, offers a free course entitled Money, Banking and Central Banks with a large section dedicated to bitcoin.

Another example is the Coala initiative with its community of academics, lawyers, technologists and entrepreneurs whose research, policy and infrastructure-building along with so-called Blockchain Workshops can be considered  informal education units.

Finally, in February 2016 an education technology writer Audrey Watters announced her new research project dedicated to blockchain’s applicability to education.

“What – if anything – can blockchain offer education technology,” Watters has asked, and we at CoinFox are eager to see what the answer will be.

Diana Bogdan