THE LATEST COURSE CATALOG TREND? BLOCKCHAIN 101 - Wired

On a clear, warm night earlier this year, several dozen students at the University of California, Berkeley, folded themselves into gray chairs for a three-hour class on how to think like blockchain entrepreneurs. The evening’s challenge, presented by Berkeley city councilmember Ben Bartlett, was to brainstorm how blockchain technology might be used to alleviate the city’s growing homeless problem. New York University, Georgetown, and Stanford are among the other institutions that offer blockchain technology courses to get students thinking about its potential uses and to better prepare them for the workforce. Job postings requiring blockchain skills ballooned by 200 percent in the first five months of this year, compared with the same period a year earlier, though they remain less than 1 percent of software development jobs, according to the research firm Burning Glass Technologies. Universities like MIT, Cornell, and Columbia are launching labs and research centers to explore the technology and its policy implications and seed the development of rigorous curricula on the topic. https://www.wired.com/story/latest-course-catalog-trend-blockchain-101/