The blockchain university: disrupting “disruption”?

This paper explores the promise of disruption of higher education offered by latest platform technologies—a combination of mobile applications for connecting teachers and students and blockchain technology for secure transactions of information and money. We start with a brief examination of several generations of technological disruptions arriving from the Silicon Valley with a special focus to educational technology. Showing that these disruptions are primarily focused to furthering capitalist mode of production, we question whether the latest disruption could provide different results. Advertised as “Uber for students, Airbnb for teachers”, the Woolf University offers the seductive promise of radical transformation of higher education based on cooperative principles. Our analysis, which is based on early ideas about the development of the Woolf University, indicates that it has the potentials to offer cooperative learning to students, cooperative employment to academic workers, all the while retaining highest quality of teaching and learning modelled after ancient scholastic principles. On that basis, we conclude that the Woolf University, together with other adaptations of blockchain technology for educational purposes, does offer a lot of potential for fundamental disruption of higher education and should be closely watched in the times to come