BITDEGREE (REVOLUTIONIZING EDUCATION WITH BLOCKCHAIN)

Want to know what Bitdegree is all about? That was how i felt as well initially until i read the white paper. Interesting project with great potential i must say.

SUMMARY
The conventional centralized higher education system takes 4-6 years to educate a person and there is no guarantee of employment afterwards. We believe that the digital industry today lacks workforce because higher education institutions are not responding to the needs of actual labor market. Most of the skills needed by the digital industry don’t even require a degree in higher education. Workforce that has practical digital economy skills and willingness to learn is needed. That is why today more and more tech-savvy teens get freelancing jobs and earn more than their parents do.

BitDegree is world’s first blockchain-powered, smart-incentives based online education platform which will revolutionize global education and tech recruiting. The main purpose of the BitDegree platform is to let Students acquire skills that are currently required by the labor market. The way to do it is not to ask business what skills they need in the far future (3-5 years), but to respond to explicitly expressed skilled labor demand quickly. BitDegree will directly align the incentives of students and anyone who wants them to become knowledge workers in digital economy - like current or potential employers, digital service providers and sponsors. Smart-incentive is a smart contract on Ethereum network ensuring the exchange of tokens between a sponsor (the Incentive Creator) and a student (the Incentive Taker), who is committing to study a specific subject in order to receive tokens (the Incentive). The BitDegree platform will offer students online courses with a clear and transparent blockchain-based reward system and achievement tracking. Our use case for blockchain is not sensitive to prolonged waiting periods before transactions are committed, thus, overall platform overhead (as in expenses) of using Ethereum network for transactional and immutable data storage needs, will be low. To make the learning process as exciting as playing Minecraft we will use Octalysis framework of gamification design.

We see BitDegree as a unique tool for business to recruit tech talent and shape global education to its needs through smart-incentives. National government Job centers will be able to track the demand of skills without having to involve scrupulous report gatherings from businesses and also help jobless citizens by subsidising studies for skills on high demand. Think about it as Coursera and HackerRank merged together, powered by blockchain technology. The main benefit of BitDegree platform to incentive providers is the possibility to initiate and maintain dialogue with upcoming talent and reward them for achievements through smart-incentives. Smart-incentives on the BitDegree platform
will range from small to large and be location and topic targeted. From the student’s perspective, it means getting paid to learn new skills based on local demand, which not only incentivizes but can actually be a viable escape from unskilled work.

Building quality, interactive, and engaging learning experience is essential to every successful education platform. There are attempts to solve the problem: i.e. Coursera and CodeCademy. Despite the fact that these front-runners face abysmal course completion results, similar to the entire MOOCs industry – just 5%, these two companies together are worth more than $1 billion today. Our proposed incentive alignment approach was not tried in any of educational platforms we are aware of. A merit based rewards, currently practiced in existing platforms, does not substitute income needed to support a student while studying.

We will be pursuing our vision to go forward with the development of BitDegree platform even in case of unsuccessful ICO. We anticipate a closed testing, involving incentive providers in [2018Q3] and open launch of BitDegree in [2019Q1]. The capital available to the development of the platform will determine functionality and choice of the course material available. The anticipated capital raised during ICO, will enable us to directly compete with existing education platforms even prior to the benefits reaped by the popularity of BitDegree platform. Companies creating technologies used in digital economy should consider contributing to development of the platform, and ensure technologies they create are represented in the course material available to millions of students.

WE BELIEVE THAT:

1. Everybody in the world deserves access to proper education, no matter the gender,
   race, age or religion;

2. The key to success of any technology business is to hire the best and well educated
   talent, therefore, business is ready to invest in talent;

3. The state education system is flawed and needs to be democratized, decentralized
   and otherwise disrupted;

4. Blockchain-powered smart-incentives and gamification features they enable are the
   game changers.

SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM

1. Employers looking for tech talent

2. Service provider looking for educated customers

3. People seeking knowledge and digital economy based
   employment

4. Synthesis of the problem worth solving

BITDEGREE: IT IS ALL ABOUT EDUCATION

We are proposing a digital incentivized studying platform as a new tool to grow the global tech talent pool. Companies in need of tech talent will provide financial incentives to students willing to participate in training courses and to develop their skills. Companies seeking to get people familiar with newly introduced technology or services, will provide financial incentives to students willing to spend time to learn and to try the company’s offerings. By providing incentives, any company explicitly signals the demand for certain qualifications, or informs about knowledge and skills needed to effectively use newly introduced technology/products/services. People looking for new opportunities will learn new technologies, develop practical skills in demand, and get familiar with existing technological solutions provided by solution providers. Job seekers will enroll to subsidized courses to get more knowledge and to develop skills within selected technology topic. The course materials and learning process will be made interactive and in a highly engaging way by following field-proven gamification methods. Students will be able to communicate with other students and course mentors, to pose questions, and seek for more detailed explanations. All course material and progress assessment will be divided to small chunks in order to enable short-term effort in the reward cycle.

In addition to subsidized course material, each student showing learning progress will be rewarded with platform Tokens. Companies providing incentives will be able to get in touch with students enrolled in subsidized courses, and possibly offer employment positions for good performers. Companies, offering to accept Tokens for services, will allow students to deepen newly acquired skills, while using commercial services offerings. Students will also be able to exchange Tokens on exchange platforms. The BitDegree platform will register progress of each student, and will provide ways the students can prove they overcome the challenge of developing and applying skills to solve problems. BitDegree will rely on Ethereum platform to enable incentives scheme and to store transparent record of all achievements made by students.

1. Introducing smart-incentives

2. Gamification as a cornerstone of the platform design

Roadmap and a Bold vision for the BitDegree platform:

We practice agile development and therefore carefully plan for the immediate goals and draw general plans for the future according to the vision that we want to achieve. We share the motto of Jeff Bezos– “We are stubborn on vision but flexible on details”. We see at least 3 essential stages of platform development. We have clear plans for v1, however, what will happen in v2 and v3 will depend on the lessons learned in v1.

We follow core guiding principles for the platform design:

1. decentralization,
2. transparency,
3. inclusion,
4. sustainability,
5. growth,
6. disruption.

We will use these principles when deciding on the strategic direction of the platform and new functionalities.

WHY BITDEGREE IS SUPERIOR TO ITS ALTERNATIVES

There are many well established companies providing remote learning experience like Coursera, Khan Academy, EdX, CodeCademy, FutureLearn, XuetangX, Udacity and others. These companies run platforms to provide access to content, assess student knowledge, enable student to mentor communication. Each company has its take on how to cover its running expenses, for example: by being supported by consortium of universities, providing paid course or paid assessment, providing company and product branding. By being pioneers in the new field, those companies burned through huge amounts of investments to learn about things that does work together and things that does not fit well.
Sadly, after becoming very popular, they become too big to risk introducing radically new ideas to get funded, introducing new forms of training material, or experimenting with new communication patterns. The current success of these companies is staggering and allows to measure the size of market we are about to enter. Top 10 of these companies have in excess of 110 million cumulative registered users with some companies showing revenue in excess of 60M USD.

We are coming late to the market. Coming late to the market allows us to study history and attempts of each company to test ideas, techniques and to create user centric focused workflows. Being small allows us to rapidly test new ideas and ways we respond to the needs of our students, sponsors and contributors. We studied most of well-established remote education providers by enrolling to courses and learned best practices used but also experienced many difficulties. We analyzed availability and price of certification, availability of scholarship, value provided to scholarship sponsors and a level of gamification employed in educational process.

Although gamification techniques are well tested and proven to help motivate the consumers in other fields it is still seldom used by existing competitors, who stick to more old style, tried and true academic approaches. We will assemble current best practices of providing free access to teaching material and augment it with learning process gamification, human mentorship, free and verifiable assessment, financial incentives to students and employer-student matching capabilities together not employed by any of our competitors.

We are not a big threat to existing market players as education market is wildly expanding and can accommodate additional players. Each player brings in exclusive features, which allows to attract customers but strategic partnerships are common to allow exchange of training material. However, with time we believe our gamification and incentives based model will show its benefits and lead to capturing a significant share of remote education market.

The market potential of BitDegree:

It is easy for everyone to observe the rapid expansion of remote education and e-learning market. We believe that with the new incentivized learning model, the BitDegree brings the next wave of e-learning adoption, which will spur the growth of the user base. We estimate user base to double every two years.

TOKEN LAUNCH

BitDegree will issue an ERC20 compatible token, which will be used to provide incentives to students and contributors of the platform.

The sale of BitDegree tokens will be final and non-refundable. The BitDegree will not be responsible for any loss of BitDegree tokens or situations making it impossible to access BitDegree tokens, which may result from any actions or omissions of the user or nay person undertaking to acquire BitDegree tokens, as well as in case of hacker attacks.

We plan to offer anyone sharing our vision to contribute to the development of BitDegree by buying BitDegree tokens during the Initial Coin Offering event, which will be held on Q4, 2017. BitDegree goal is to raise a minimum of 5 million USD and to stop accepting contributions when 25-30 million USD will be collected. Some of the numbers may change due to ETH/USD exchange rate volatility, but the following numbers are best estimates as of September, 2017.

• Maximum financing:

75,000 ETH - may change due to exchange rate changes;

• Minimum financing:
16,000 ETH - may change due to exchange rate changes;

• Exchange rate:
1 ETH = 10,000 Bitdegree Tokens - may change with ETH exchange rates;

• Token contract address:
Will be published only on website bitdegree.org 48hrs before the crowdsale launch date;

• Launch date and time:
Date to be announced soon. Block number will be published on website. Dates may be prone to change;

• Token launch time-frame:
30 days.

• Token launch completion:
Token launch will end when either the maximum number of ETH is raised or 30 days have
passed. If less than the minimum of ETHs are raised, ETH can be retrieved by holders of
BitDegree Token;

• Contributors sending ETH to BitDegree Smart Contract address will immediately receive
tokens.

Token Distribution

• BitDegree foundation: 150 million;
• Scholarships pool: 375 million;
• Token available to public at launch: 765 million;
• Team: 150 million; locked for 360 days;
• Bounties / Advisors / Partners: 60 million;
• Tokens in total: 1,5 billion.

People behind BitDegree

The team is comprised of multi-skilled professionals that have worked with each other in various capacities and became friends. This joins the project that everyone in the team is highly passionate about. This is the time when everyone dreams big and goes big. Most of the team has already worked together scaling solutions that reached millions of users and stumbled upon the need to educate them, whereas some others have worked on the educational initiatives experience, which can be directly applied to BitDegree.

Andrius Putna, CEO, co-founder
11 years in software engineering. Blockchain advocate. Person behind the success of 000webhost - world’s first and biggest free cloud hosting platform designed for learning, testing and experimenting. Hostinger product architect.

Danielius Stasiulis, CBO, co-founder
Head of Startup Division at Civitta (7 years) - the leading management consulting firm in Eastern Europe. Advised 300+ startups and worked with many startup programs, including Berkeley Skydeck in Silicon Valley. He focuses on ICO and blockchain-based business models.

Ervinas Rimdeika, CLO, co-founder
Ervinas is a FinTech fan and has extensive practice in related fields of corporate, intellectual property and business transaction law questions as well. He worked not only at a few well-known law firms, but also at one of the largest company’s group in Lithuania and Baltic States. In previous years Ervinas Rimdeika was a member of one of the top raising Baltics FinTech startups and reached impressive results, where Lithuanian Supreme Court changed case-law and formed new interpretation rules on financial lease and other matters. Clients and colleagues especially value Ervinas Rimdeika for deep legal knowledge, critical and strategic thinking, in-depth analysis of the problems as well as rational
approach.

Rio Asatiani, CMO, co-founder
With more than 14 years of experience in effective customer acquisition fields, working with new brands and startup launches, Rio is a growth-hacking guru & Google Certified Partner who led 000webhost and Hostinger to an international success in more than 40 countries by attracting 29+ millions of new users. He joined the BitDegree project having a strong vision in innovative acquisition channels and a solid experience in growth-hacking. Rio ensures the success of BitDegree on an international level.

Darius Rugevičius, Partner in Prime Block Capital Investment Fund
Darius is experienced in building successful technology based business, having sold two of his previous start-ups in the past 4 years alone. Using his skills to implement effective marketing strategies, propel execution, and meet deadlines, he has assisted companies operating in the blockchain, fin-tech, robotics and biotech sectors. In the past year Darius has worked with numerous blockchain projects, helping them to develop successful strategies, networking and outcome.

Advisors

Jeff Burton, Serial Entrepreneur, co-founder of Electronic Arts
Global technology executive, keynote speaker and a Silicon Valley old-timer. Jeff was a founding team member of Electronic Arts, where he has overseen the global expansion of its operations. Jeff has high-level connections in Silicon Valley and around the world that he is using to help startups like BitDegree. Jeff has developed Berkeley Skydeck startup accelerator and is currently involved in helping startups around the world to grow and scale into the Silicon Valley. Jeff is a very great guy that believes in BitDegree and wants to help.

Roberto Santana, Product and Strategy Advisor, Former Senior Manager at Coursera
Entrepreneur and Former Product Management Growth Lead at Coursera. Roberto played a role in helping Coursera scale to a global level and acquire over 27 million learners worldwide. Roberto is Stanford MBA with 3 engineering degrees in computer science and design. His exceptional engineering and technical knowledge has led him to scale several startups by managing the project and business development, including San Francisco-based Zendesk, where he helped grow number of paying customers by 60%. Prior to his work in the Valley, Roberto was a Senior Engineer with Shell, where he led cross-functional team responsible for the delivery of products that accounted for $400M in refinery revenues.

Maurice De Hond, Steve JobsSchool Founder, Personalized Learning Advisor
A successful entrepreneur and founder of Steve JobsSchool - a modern elementary school concept designed to see each child as an individual and nurture him based on his strengths and interests. This learning model quickly became successful and is already adopted in more than 35 schools in the Netherlands. Being the pioneer of innovative learning ensures the implementation of modern educational solutions on the Bitdegree platform on the long term that will establish a solid foundation for IT passionate people to reach their full potential.

James K. Scarborough, Stanford University PhD., Gamification Advisor
Currently a candidate for PhD. at Stanford University, James main focus is to deeply engage players for the purpose of increasing workplace, classroom, and similar forms of individual and team based productivity. He is currently involved in projects assessing the effects of real social interaction in virtual spaces concerning primarily energy efficiency behaviors, gender and culture specific responses, and the physiological impact of social interactions in goal-oriented game environments. Having a profound experience in gamification and working with companies that created such games as Tetris, Civilization, Falcon Flight Simulator, led him to joining the BitDegree team and assures a deeply engaging environment of the platform on the long term.

Arnas Stuopelis, COO, co-founder
Arnas is the CEO of Hostinger. Prior to taking the role of the CEO, for 6 years Arnas was responsible for business development at Hostinger. He successfully expanded Hostinger on a global level as well as played an important role when creating one of the most successful web hosting brands in Indonesia - Niagahoster.co.id. With his profound entrepreneurship skills and a solid experience in business development, Arnas knows how to scale a project to a global success.

Ričardas Pocius, Technical advisor
Ričardas is a passionate distributed systems engineer who enjoys sharing his experience and knowledge with others. Determined on keeping magic out of the systems. Organiser of Erlang workshop/meetup in Vilnius,LT.

Bitdegree BDG is a brilliant project i must say, great team, good vision, brilliant advisory board.

Join us today!!!

BitDegree website: https://www.bitdegree.org/
White paper: https://www.bitdegree.org/white-paper...
Announcements: https://t.me/bitdegree
Bitcointalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?top...
Telegram chat: https://t.me/bitdegree
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bitdegree.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitdegree_org