Credit to blockchain that paved the way for the emergency of NFT. However, since its inception, the billion-dollar industry has attracted criticism as it has gotten accolades. Some argued NFTs are bubbies waiting to bust, citing that they are simply art pieces with no actual use case. Since 2014 when Quantum launched as the first NFT, we are talking beyond arts to NFT use cases in the top 10 use cases of NFT in Education, among other actual use cases.
By the way, what are NFTs? According to OpenSea’s NFTs Bible, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique, digital items with blockchain-managed ownership. These NON-fungible tokens can be in the form of collectibles, game items, digital art, event tickets, domain names, and even ownership records for physical assets. Similar to representing digital arts, games, etc, they can be used in certificates, receipts, and many other educational resources.
How to apply NFT in Education
The education sector comprises online and offline mediums of learning. Before the pandemic, people mastered remote learning, making adopting NFT in Education a match in heaven in a post-pandemic era. Before itemizing the top 10 NFT use cases in Education, let’s understand why NFT is suitable for Education.
First, every academic institution deserves originality, provenance, transparency, accountability, and immutability in its mode of operations. By design, NFT is built on a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically distributed ledger called the blockchain. Blockchain offers developers the flexibility of deploying NFT complaint tokens by entering smart contracts of owners’ metadata and participants to build NFTs on a DApp. The education system consists of a series of documentation and data capturing: when embedded on the blockchain will bring security and allow learning beyond the boundary, as enabled by the Education Ecosystem.
While it is evident that applying NFT in Education will help drive mass adoption, developers are tasked with thinking outside the box to leverage smart contracts, DApps, and the non-fungibility nature of NFTs to revolutionize the education sector. Although the Ethereum network popularized the NFT space, it is advisable for developers, creatives, and innovators to think beyond Ethereum to adopt other blockchain solutions to solve real education problems.
Top NFT use cases in Education
1. Textbook
Authors and lecturers can publish their books in the form of NFT. This will boost the quest for remote learning. This innovation will help the teachers monetize their books while avoiding piracy. On the other hand, the student can find the exact ebook they sort at ease, simply using the metadata on NFT Publishing Marketplaces like Bookwire, the Frankfurt-based digital distributor.
2. Certification
People often succeed in falsifying and forging identity and certification; this is possible because such certificates are not issued through a secured, transparent system. Knowing that every certificate is unique and neither replaceable nor interchangeable makes NFT certification a good choice. Fair enough, the NFT-type certificate of ownership was launched in May 2014. NFTs can be employed for academic certifications.
3. Registration and data capturing
There are often reports of exam malpractice in schools and identity theft in the education sector. We believe that no two people on earth have all the details the same; therefore, leveraging the non-fungibility of NFT will solve the problem. These ways, identities are tokenized in the form of an nft and details displayed through the metadata of the smart contract.
4. Patenting, innovations, and research
Several inventors, creatives, and geniuses lost credits for their works simply because they couldn’t patent them. The NFT industry can provide credits to owners using the blockchain immutability principle and embed the metadata and parameters of the invention in non-fungible tokens. For instance, in May 2021, UC Berkeley announced it tokenized and auctioned the patent disclosures for two Nobel Prize-winning inventions: CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and cancer immunotherapy, which were later sold on June 8, 2021, for 22 ETH (ca. $55,000).
5. Licensing and intellectual property
Having an intellectual property isn’t enough. It is nice to tokenize it to avoid IP infringement. According to Antitrust Law Blog, third-party IP owners should factor in NFTs of their IPs to prevent infringement. DC Comics artist José Delgo incorporated DC Comics’ IP in deploying an NFT sold for $1.85 million without the team’s consent. Similarly, educational licensing bodies should factor in NFTs in licensing members such as private forgery, piracy of IPs.
6. Awards and recognition
Instead of relying on shared assets, awarding and recognizing students’ outstanding performance, scholars will future motivate the receivers. When a student does outstandingly well, to make it memorable and more distinguished, the academic sector can deploy arts, sculptures, and ornaments in the form of NFT for them, using their metadata. For instance, Adweek animated 3D NFTs in May 2021 during Social Media Week New York.
7. Arts
Scholars who specialize in arts, symbologies, and architecture can port to the world of NFT to dream, build and create astonishingly significant non-fungible assets. That way, it creates more room for creativity as well as brings scholarship and standardization to NFT.
8. Payments
Many believe that NFTs are a fad that can fade away quickly. However, academic institutions can employ NFT in Education to sort various payments and financial obligations. Look at it as a school accepting NFT as a medium of payment.
9. Storage
Since NFT is built on the blockchain and is tokenized, certifications can be digitized in a non-fungible format. This way, it can be stored on the distributed ledger supporting NFTs.
10. Academic fundraising
NFT can be a sure way of raising funding for academic research and development. For instance, Beeple, the artist who sold the most expensive NFT, launched and auctioned another NFT for charity, raising $6m to aid a charity organization called Open Earth Foundation. Similar things can be done for Education. For instance, LEDU token has pioneered Education funding and payments. It also avails users the opportunity to pay for their project based education on the LEDU ecosystem.
Conclusion
Applying NFT in Education will give it a real-world use case, therefore, driving mass adoption. It can be applied in educational use cases desiring transparency, immutability, fungibility, and cryptographic security. We have proposed the top 10 use cases of NFT in Education through these article.
