The Potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in Higher Education as Perceived by Romanian Students

Abstract

Non-fungible token (NFT) is a distinctive, digitized, and encrypted token fabricated and stored using blockchain technology. Artists, filmmakers, photographers, game developers, and fashion designers sell their work on the NFT marketplace. Nevertheless, NFTs are no longer a concept associated with art and design and they are starting to be used in different sectors. Now, NFT is branching out to higher education, where students, tutors, and institutions can use NFTs for different purposes. Given these coordinates, in this article we have chosen to discuss the applicability of NFT related to higher education. Thus, our paper presents, in the introductory part, the conceptual delimitations regarding NFTs. Areas of application, and the main ways of use in education, are presented next, showing that adoption of NFTs in higher education has been too little addressed in the literature. Most of the work in the field insists on the technical aspects and only subsidiarily deals with the issues regarding the level of understanding of the NFT concept by potential or actual users and the degree of adoption and use of these as solutions to some problems of higher education. In order to cover these gaps identified in the literature, we presented, in the second part of the paper, the methodology and results of an exploratory research, conducted on a sample of 383 students from Faculty of Business and Tourism -Bucharest University of Economic Studies, which allowed us to identify the level of understanding the concept, the degree of openness to the adoption of NFTs as diplomas/certificates/attestations for the recognition of studies/knowledge/skills/competences acquired in the formal education system, and, also, the associated benefits and challenges, from the perspective of the Romanian students.