Bitshares and Steemit Feedback from my FINA 469 @UofSC Experiment

It has been four months already since I first announced my plan to integrate Bitshares and Steemit into an undergraduate Intro to Investments course I was teaching. A week into the course I had launched a trading competition using Bitshares, and about midway through the course—a month into it—I posted an update with some initial lessons learned. 

 
So here’s the [long overdue!] closing chapter to this story… 

Overall, both Bitshares and Steemit made for excellent educational tools. Bitshares allowed the students to get hands on experience with trading, which was great to show them real-life examples of some of the things we talked about it class, like shorting, derivatives, currencies, and diversification across multiple positions. 

 
Steemit was an interesting way to incentivize class participation by discussing current events. Similar to the Bitshares competition, I created a Steemit competition that also resulted in extra credit. The students had to focus on economics and finance articles (other than one #introducemyself post) and they could post or just comment on other articles. The three students with the highest final estimated account values earned extra credit.  

Both platforms were awesome ways to introduce students to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, and members of the community spontaneously supported these projects. @onceuponatime even donated 10 bitSILVER that was apportioned to the top 3 winners of the trading competition.  

OK so rather than listen to me ramble any further, here’s what the students had to say: 

Bitshares

1. Technical difficulties using OpenLedger turned off some of the students. Some lost their wallet files and ended up not being able to participate. 
2. OpenLedger was daunting at first, but became easier with practice.
3. Cool user interface for trading, students liked the graphs.
4. Liked the currency MPAs and would like to see more currencies available.
5. Students with no trading experience found the platform over-stimulating.
6. A mobile app would be awesome, so you can trade on your phone.

"I see Bitshares expanding in the future without a doubt, and predict that it will be a sustainable platform that can engage professional and amateur investors alike.”

"In bitshares, what I like the most is the just how I could see trades happening really fast and see how dynamic this market is, and what I did not like is the fact that it took me forever to truly understand how to work with the platform.”

Steemit

1. Steemit platform is very user friendly; simple to use and clear.
2. Difficult to understand the compensation process.
3. More video tutorials would be useful.
4. Content too strongly concentrated on Bitcoin, Steemit, and other cryptocurrency topics.

"To me, Steemit resembled a blog from the earlier 2000s visually, or at least it’s interface did. There’s almost so much going on that it can be difficult to navigate the main pages of the platform.”

"My Opinion of the whole idea is split between the idea of, 'Wow this is cool and trendy', to, 'Wow I’ve already lost interest in 30 minutes’.”

"I did not like how feeds seemed to be repetitive with the same themes of Nudes/Attractive pictures of people, Wow STEEM, and other various exhausting blogs.”

Conclusion

As an instructor, both technologies provided excellent training tools for a finance course. The fact that OpenLedger is, well, fully open, I got to see exactly what the students were doing. Same with Steemit; the public aspect of the system made it easy to track participation and looking at the final wallet balance provided a nice market-based evaluation mechanism. 

The student experience seems to have been a mixed bag, but that’s to be expected. Both technologies can be improved and feedback from outside the communities, like this, should be taken seriously. It’s all too easy for tech communities to turn insular, but rapid growth will depend on reaching out to people who have never heard of Bitcoin, let alone Bitshares or Steemit. 

"There is certainly a revolution going on here…" 

A big THANK YOU to all who participated in the community and to the students!

Image source: https://steemit.com/steemit/@jademont/build-your-fan-economy-in-steemit-by-bitshares-everyone-can-be-a-star