One of England’s most venerable institutes of financial learning has announced an online course on investing in cryptocurrency starting August 28.
Famed London Institute Launches Crypto Course
The Financial Times has reported that the London School of Economics will be offering a new course dubbed “Cryptocurrency Investment and Disruption,” The courses mandate is to give students the “practical skills to interact with cryptocurrency exchanges,” Skills which include; using cryptocurrency wallets and evaluating the prospects of an initial coin offering (ICO).
The famed school which is the alma mater to 18 winners of the Nobel Prize and numerous “world leaders” cites its motto to “understand the causes of things” as the motivating factor for establishing the new course.
Though the school’s listed goals of assisting “private organizations, individual investors, financial service firms, governments and regulatory bodies (to understand the) highly disruptive trend” sounds slightly dated already, the curriculum teaser is more inclusive. As quoted by the Financial Times:
“The exponential growth and volatility of cryptocurrencies and the distributed ledger technology underpinning them has led to a global interest in cryptoassets, ICOs and the distribution of digital wealth.”
The online course offered by the London School will be led by Dr. Carsten Sorensen, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Innovation. The course will cost 1,800 Euros and is to consist of six modules, adding up to 60 hours of class time, which has been judged as a bargain by posters on Reddit.
LSE Getting a Late Start
The announcement from the school comes a bit late to the game as some institutes of higher learning began creating courses to deal with the break out of cryptocurrency as a real financial subject months, if not years ago.
A wave of course offerings washed through some of the most elite schools in America at the start of the last semester when the hype around Bitcoin was at its peak. Universities including Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke and the Massachuttess Institute of Technology all began offering courses on cryptocurrency for their fall 2018 semesters.
David Yermack, a business and law professor at New York University who began offering one of the first for-credit courses on the topic back in 2014, reported his classes were standing room only in 2017. Professor Yermack commented on that first year saying,
“There was some gentle ribbing from my colleagues when I began giving talks on Bitcoin, But within a few months, I was being invited to Basel to talk with central bankers, and the joking from my colleagues stopped after that.”
There is little doubt that the academic world will continually expand its course coverage of both cryptocurrency and blockchain technology as both become more and more important in the financial and business sectors. As the London School of Economics plans their first crypto course so has the University of Malta announced their first degree in blockchain studies to commence in October 2018.
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