As we have witnessed in a variety of industries, higher education is embracing change and moving from a centralized framework to a world where most learning happens beyond the boundaries of traditional institutions (decentralized education or “DeEd”). This should not be surprising, as most industries have made a similar journey. Even healthcare, another of society’s building blocks, has gone from a hospital-centric framework to a more patient-centric and “liquid” hospital model.
This migration from centralized to decentralized education has been forced by a perfect storm: a massive process of upskilling and reskilling that mostly happens outside traditional universities (new players, independent courses, bootcamps and so on); the emergence of new infrastructure (Web 3) that enables novel types of peer-to-peer transactions within the so-called “creator economy”, including courses by top-notch experts in every imaginable field; and finally, an abundance of capital invested in education—we have seen, for instance, Owl Ventures, one of the main VCs in this space, raise 1 billion dollars for edtech ventures, a magnitude of funding rarely seen in education.
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