Vietnam Education Ministry Moves to Blockchain for Diplomas

The move includes a trial run over 2020-2021, including secondary and tertiary education diplomas for over 1.5 million students, and then adding previously existing degrees held. Students graduating with other types of diplomas under the ministry’s umbrella will also be included.

#TomoChain 🤝 Vietnam’s Ministry of Education & Training to officially architect & utilize the NQA system for millions of Diplomas on the #Blockchain, handling an entire nation’s demand for education 🔥

Marching to blockchain mass adoption! 🚀https://t.co/mU1QWkhbqp

— TomoChain (@TomoChainANN) November 18, 2020

The development by TomoChain took place against a background of unaligned qualifications handling by institutions, to the damage of recruiters and HR departments. “The qualifications archive with blockchain technology has been researched and adopted by TomoChain for over one year,” explained Long Vuong, Founder, and CEO of TomoChain. Deputy Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Van Phuc noted that:

“Currently, storing data evidence on a public chain is a global trend due to its economical, secure and confidential advantages. I strongly believe that this system lays a solid foundation for adopting cutting-edge digital technologies in e-government 4.0 in Vietnam, helping us walk alongside other innovative, progressive countries around the world.”

Education on the Blockchain

While diplomas on blockchain have been around since MIT initiated a pilot program in 2017 for 111 graduates, adoption has been slow and rarely at the scale of the Vietnamese – TomoChain project. Other examples include the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, which began with 4,800 students in 2019. South Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology used its experience from 2019 when it granted blockchain certificates to graduates of a blockchain CEO course. It issued diplomas to 828 new graduates on a blockchain in 2020 as part of the institution’s COVID-19 measures. Some universities in Columbia have also used blockchain for accessing diplomas. Vietnam joins Malta as a country issuing blockchain diplomas on the national instead of the institutional level. The diplomas are one facet of a broader push by the Vietnamese government to implement the technology across ministries, including the Ministry of Information and Communications, which unveiled its akacChain blockchain platform in August. The Vietnamese government is calling for further use of blockchain, including its electronic identification (eKYC) system, though details are not yet forthcoming. If it continues at this pace, Vietnam could overtake Malta in the educational blockchain space. After a two-year trial with Learning Machine Technologies, Malta began rolling out blockchain credentials for both education and employment records in February 2019.