Decentralised Education - In a utopia - Thought piece by Crypto SI

We are currently living in the information age and education is possibly the most important information available.

Education is available everywhere but this information itself is far less valuable without standards. In my opinion its the setting and maintaining of these standards that's the most important required factor for progressive and truly decentralised education.
Please bear in mind that I am by no means an education expert, apart from having experienced the education system in UK to university level. My background is in computer science and internet applications. So these are just generalised concepts based on my intimate knowledge of the crypto-currency industry and social/governance systems located therein.

As with all things in Crypto and indeed tech, evolution is often a lot better and more secure than revolution, the most complex moving part is always human behaviour and it's so difficult to predict that changing too many parts of something with so much dependency on human behaviour often leads to many unintended consequences, so to mitigate that I will propose an initial step and a final destination for each of the 4 categories I will be assessing.

The three categories are: Standards, Delivery, Pricing, Certification.
There will be some overlap on these ideas.

Before we start I should summarise the main stakeholders in such a system as they will feature heavily in my proposal

Institutions -- Schools, colleges, universities and even home tutors, anyone who delivers education to people physically.

Syllabus creators -- They are the people responsible for creating syllabi on the platform and updating them

Course creators -- They will create courses and modules based on the syllabi

Students -- They are the people who will learn the courses and be certified at the end

Token holders -- They are investors into the platforms blockchain, they will promote the platform and stake to verify transactions and ensure the database of alumni is kept for eternity.

Any person or organisation can belong to any or all of these categories, at one time or another.

Standards

By far the most important factor in education is standards. Standards ensure that worldwide if a person claims to have a level of knowledge then they would know certain things. But how do we implement the setting of standards within a decentralised system? Well, firstly we have to move to a pseudo-centralised system to ensure that the standards are being initially set by people with the expertise, skills and reputation to do so. These standards however need to have input from the wider economy and academics in their field. In laymans terms, 5-10 experts get together to set the definitions of what needs to be learnt, and they get feedback from the wider community before setting the standards. Once set, the syllabi would be adhered to in the creation of courses by independent educators. Once created these courses would need to be approved by the same council that set the syllabus. This is where the first issues arise, as this process would require incentivising, the differences in educational costs around the world are huge, so a solution needs to be found that doesn't disadvantage the developing world.

For this I propose a set course proposal fee (CPF), which is paid to the syllabus creators, this should not be an arbitrary figure, but the CPF should be set at the time of syllabus writing and its value should be re-visted regularly to account for fluctuations in the token price of the platform. Educators who wish to have courses available on the decentralised platform should pay the fee, and they should not be refunded should the course be rejected. Educators should be able to submit full courses but also smaller modules for differing CPFs.

All people who then take the course would receive internationally recognisable qualifications.

Delivery

Here's is the where blockchain is pivotal to implementing decentralised education. Delivery is bound to vary massively from place to place, with certain places having better facilities. People taking courses should be charged at this point of delivery by the institution that is delivering the course, this fee should be recorded as part of their certification, with higher fees suggesting but not proving a higher standard of tutoring, while the core course materials themselves can remain constant, this should hopefully mitigate differences in expected reparations from varying countries. A portion from each tuition fee recieved should go to the course creator and a smaller portion to the syllabus creators and a smaller portion should be burnt for token economics reasons. This information should all be stored in the students certification which will be held on the actual blockchain of the platform. Whether the student passes or fails they will always receive an immutable certifiaction, cryptographically signed by the institution that delivered the course. Should the course be delivered online then the website that delivers should have a means of automatically issuing these certificates after a set timeframe. Hopefully this method of doing things will allow schools in the developing world to have access to the same materials if not the same facilities, this should also speed up the progression and development of courses, so that they are always delivering education on the most cutting edge of human knowledge.

Pricing

Pricing for each stage of the decentralised education platform needs to be considered with 1 thing in mind only, the sustainability and security of the educational platfrom itself. pricing should never be altered to make any stakeholder more profitable or to encourage students from any part of the world or financial background. A decentralised education platform, will have a complete economy of it's own and it's token supply needs to be considered greatly, both for incentive for investment but balanced with accessibility for people. for example if CPF are 100 tokens and the token value raises to $100 each then it will cost $10K to simply propose a course, this will put it out of the reach of educators from certain places without sponsorship, while a course proposal fee of $0.10 could lead to spam and low quality materials. This will be the hardest part of any decentralised platform to build as there is no precedent for knowing which portion of the system will have which demand at which point in the platforms development. I would propose as a starting point that the tokens have an infinte total supply, bound by a steady inflation rate, however for all transactions, fees and certifications there should be some burning of tokens so as the platforms token supply inflation is limited by usage. So as to say the more the platform is actually used the slower inflation becomes, while investors will see a constant steady increase in their tokens, the value of these tokens may always be increasing by virtue of having a decreasing supply, the platform economy may and possibly should be slightly deflationary. The cost of courses to the public should be determined by the institution delivering the course. Universities should charge what they feel a course is worth to them as their facilities and teaching costs will vary from place to place and institution to institution. Each institution should have the choice to be approved by syllabus creators, but this does not have to be mandatory, but must be reflected in the certification that their students receive, for example if a university is not approved then a persons online certification stored in the blockchain should reflect this fact. This could be simply achieved by querying each institutions unique ID against a white list from the syllabus creators at the exact time of the certificate being added to the blockchain. pricing for syllabus approval should be based on the price of education in the nation the institution is based. It should be based on an average cost and the price a syllabus charges should never exceed that average so as to place approval out of the realistic reach of an institution. this means institutions from richer nations will have to pay more, but by their location they will also be charging more. These fees should also be reviewed regularly and their should be arbitration and dispute resolution processes set up in case of grievances.

Courses that are based purely online should have no limits to what they charge, but once materials are approved the course creator should not have the right to stop institutions from delivering their courses and using their materials for less than they wished to receive if the institutions are approved. Course makers will have to mitigate this themselves by pushing their courses to people who can afford their fees. Free courses is a difficult issue, and I as yet to not have a proposal for them. this may end up being the issue of the institution offering the fee course to fund the purchase of the materials, although this solution is not ideal.

Certification

This has been touched on in some detail in previous sections, I propose that Certification for all students of a decentralised platform should be held on that platforms blockchain primarily. Students may recieve paper certification, with a hash of the transaction which contains proof of their course participation. The benefits of blockchain verification is that it can be referenced safely and reliably online from anywhere in the world instantly, also its immutable and cannot be edited by 3rd parties without permission, also all edits are tracked. The certification system would be pretty simple to implement. It would involve creating a transaction at the end of the course for the purposes of storing information about the students participation. Within the transaction would be information such as student name, date of birth, date of pass, fingerprint hash, passing grade, fee charged, institution name, institution approval, course taken, syllabus taken. Students would then be able to take courses anonymously as all of these fields will not be mandatory. for example leaving name and date of birth blank but adding fingerprint would provide some great anonymity while allowing the student to prove their credentials privately to an employer, this would allow for some otherwise sanctioned courses to be taught, for example billingual education was outlawed in california for decades, and also education is not available to illegal immigrants in certain parts of the world. This certification system would remove the state from a persons right to education by removing a states ability to link a persons migration status to their qualification. Institutions no longer have to take peoples name if they dont want to. they just take their money and their fingerprint and hash it, safe in the knowledge that they are not harbouring illegal activity. I will concede that this view is quite personal and libertarian so should be scrutinised by sensible eyes.

Summary

In summary this is a broad overview of what a decentralised education platform should (imho) look like, it should take into account differing financial and legal situations around the world and deliver the fairest and best incentivised platform for teaching and certifying education. I hope to see projects like NTRN start to head in this direction, while it will take a lot of work, the implications for mankind would be staggering and the harnessing of the internet and horizontal communication to this degree would be a wonderful thing to see, and take us one step closer to our inevitable utopia.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss any of these ideas further, feel free to drop me a line, my contact details are below.

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