Delivering a 5 week steemit course to promote the platform in Wales - anyone done anything similar?
As part of my work promoting steemit in Wales I have been asked whether I could run a course to teach people about the platform.
This came up while I was recruiting people as part of the #signup100 campaign.
It did rather take me by surprise as I hadn't envisaged doing any sort of course. So far I have just spent half an hour or so with the people I have recruited to show them the basics of how to use steemit.
A course is a good idea though. I am sure people would benefit from more extensive training. Steemit can be rather daunting to a newcomer.
So I have spent much of the day thinking about how I could deliver a course and what the content would be.
Logisitcs
I would hire a room at a community hall or similar venue in my nearest town. I will aim for a venue with full disabled access.
The room would of course need to have good, reliable wifi.
I anticipate each session would be two hours long - the first hour would be teaching theory, the second hour would be guided practical creating posts.
The course would run over 5 weeks. This is an arbitrary number but it feels about right for someone to get to grips with enough of steemit to get over the initial difficulties and make a go of it.
There would be a maximum of 10 participants - although I wonder if this might be a little too many to give everyone enough attention.
All participants would need to bring their own laptop. Smartphones could be used but that does make the guided practicals much more difficult. I might have one or two spare laptops available if needed.
Ideally participants would have some basic graphic manipulation software available. Any recommendations for the best free online or free to download and simple to use graphics software if they don't have any?
Because of the account approval delays I will attempt to ensure all course participants have signed up and got their accounts activated before the first lesson.
Content
If anyone has a ready-made course available do please let me know. No wheels need to be reinvented on this.
I think I recall @stellabelle running some Saturday courses. Not sure though if they were wider crypto / bitcoin courses rather than steemit specific.
Here is my rough and ready first draft of a syllabus for the five week course. It will still need considerable refinement - particularly on order of delivery. All suggestions and inputs welcome.
Week 1 : Steem, Steemit and the Blockchain - Getting Started
- What is Steem and what is steemit?
- A brief introduction to cryptocurrencies and the steem blockchain.
- Getting an account on steem. Setting up your profile. Passwords and keys.
- Making a first introduce yourself post.
Week 2 : Voting, Steempower & Maker better posts
- Voting - when and how.
- Steempower, Steem and SBDs.
- What to post about? How often to post?
- Markdown, layout and basic graphics.
Week 3 : Networking, commenting and building a following
- Commenting and comment etiquette [or should this be in week 2?]
- Steemit.chat and Discords.
- Finding communities.
- PAL and other big communities.
- MSP Waves and other radio stations.
Week 4 : Advanced steemit
- Minnows, dolpins, whales
- Witnesses
- Bid bots and auto-voters
- Buying steem and selling steem
Week 5 : Other ways to post to the steem blochain
- Busy.org, ChainBB, eSteem
- Steepshot and Zappl
- DTube and DSound
- DMania and DLive
Costs
It would be great to not have to charge at all for the course.
But there will be costs - room hire (£15 - £20 per week), refreshements, printing etc.
Also if there is no charge you can often get 'no-shows' and the spaces on the course are wasted.
However I have a plan to get the best of both worlds.
I will charge a £25 (US$34) 'deposit' rather than a course fee. At the end of the five weeks I will ask the participants to pay me the equivalent of £25 in SBD or steem and I will then return the £25 deposit to them.
This assumes that they will have earnt on steemit the equivalent of £25 during the course. I believe that is perfectly feasible if they work at it between sessions. It will also encourage people to ensure they attend all five sessions.
Assuming that works out then they will have in effect had the course for free - zero-sum education !!!
This is still a work in progress. It will be about 2 months before the course would run.
I welcome any input, ideas, suggestions on the course design and logistics.
Any materials I develop for this course I will happily make available to anyone else who wants to use them elsewhere in the world.
I hope the course will successfully onboard and retain a group of steemians in my local area.
And I hope they in turn will spread the word to the their friends, family and colleagues about the potential of steemit.
Although steemit is an online world I do very much believe in the power of boots on the ground and face-to-face promotion.
Let's teach the world to steem.
You might also be interested in some of my other posts :
A Challenge for 2018 - can I sign up 100 new people to steemit in one year? #signup100
SteemRadio - schedule of all the steemit radio shows - week beginning 8 January 2018
Steemit in Wales - heading for 100% growth - first meetup on 10 February
My Childhood Days in the Home Counties of England, 1966 - The School Fete
MSP Waves Radio : Pennsif on Air with Globocop : What happened in 1966 - the school fete edition
My Childhood Days in the Home Counties of England, c 1967 - The Flying Scotsman
A Guide to steemit for Charities - anyone interested in collaborating on this?
My strapline for steemit, and other T-shirt designs... If You Think. Steemit
My Charitable Giving - Farewell A Dollar A Day, Hello Pennsif's Pot
SteemCommerce - Businesses accepting payment in steem (v 2 @ 3 January 2018)
That was amazing! After last night I believe the steemit community can do anything...
Yesterday I became a Dolphin. Now it is time to set my steemit targets for 2018
Homesteaders & Preppers on steemit - heading towards 300 by the new year? v11 [23 Dec '17]
[ classroom image from pixabay - Creative Commons CC0 // other graphics by @pennsif ]
Amazing idea, really! The kids can pick this up faster than we might think.. and what great opportunities they will have, which are probably quite limited in Wales.
My best advice would be to do whatever it takes to make it free. I say this for a few reasons, and i believe will make this much more likely to suceed, and will remove the tension around people having paid something.. i think u could fund it from steemit upvotes and perjaps just ask for donations on top.. donations work best for this kind of thing in think...
Anyone who joins and does well WILL remeber u im sure!
Very best of luck!
The idea that Steemit could fund it surely has to be the proof of concept for taking the course! Wonderful way to market what would a free course and then make it all available on Steemit? More bloggers, more votes more Steem?
Sounds like a good plan.
Yes it will be good to make it free if possible. The total cost is likely to be around £150+ - manageeable with some good upvotes.
The only risk with that is if people don't turn up - I have had that happen before for free courses. I wouldn't want to waste the spaces. I'll have to have a think on that.
This training is part of starting to build a local steemit community here. If we could get say 100 people on steemit in and around this one small Welsh market town the impact could be quite significant.
That is doable I think with a town and hinterland population of c 3000.
I have been talking with some local community activists and they are getting very excited for the potential of this.
I hear u about the risk of empty space, but the notion of free money and bitcoin in the promotions should do the trick.. esp if its free!
My life lessons taught me to keep it simple, so by making it free u vastly simply the whole deal.. unwill be the steemit guru of Wales and get lots of support.. more so if u make it free.. i think!
Yes keeping it simple is a must. You've sold me on this.
Hopefully steem keeps up 😊
Bravo! Ill support u for starters! Great descicion for all!
👍
Finally! I think the atmosphere will change when its free, and will much more joyus and in tune with the Steemit way! No charge for entry, Steemit pays for it all!!!
Make it a free course and sell it to the Welsh communities who really need this!
That is a very good line...
Hey - Your general structure looks good ---- Top tip from a pro -stories - there is no better way of introducing something than through people's stories - pick someone from steemit (please not JB) and use them/ their profile to illustrate everything.. You've got your own story of steemit too of course.
Week 2 IMO should be:
Your biggest problem is going to be managing expectations - there they all are, 20 SP and no clout, they start following people... £200 for a rambling video WTF and here's £0.02 for my thesis WTF, BS see ya. It's one thing going through that on your own, a class of 10 all going through it... it might amplify. It's a bewildering place for newbies.
To manage that I think being totally upfront about the Whale factor and the auto upvote circles on steemit and the necessity of a 'blinkering' strategy is crucial.
You should maybe try and get some delegated steem to give people a boost when they join for the first time!
I might write you an optional sixth section - something along the lines of 'a critical perspective/ avoiding the BS/ managing expectations/ the sociology of steemit.
You should be fine with 10, maybe 8 if you're not used to teaching. There could be quite a few technical queries.
Soz, quite long there, you hit my teacher button.
Most useful advice and info here, thank you.
I'll keep you posted as this progresses... and maybe grab a bit more input if you have time.
Thank you.
Absolutely, it's the kind of project that really floats my boat! I'm in the process of writing an informal 'thesis' on steemit, part of which involves analyzing the usefulness of all the educational posts (about steemit) and selecting out those which are most useful, I'll happily share it all. Problem is it all takes time. I'm resisting this pressure to post daily and holding back until I've researched everything thoroughly.
Yes please! How about making in online as well and streaming it to STEEM? Good place to run it would be Newport (but maybe Cardiff would be better)
an online/live streamed course would be rad!
Stream it yes! I think if it was online you (as well) you would have a bigger population who could pay the price, but I still think free is better and funded by Steem.
👍
Some experimentation will be needed...
Interesting idea. No problem putting the notes online.
I've just been looking at DLive this evening. That would be an interesting challenge...
I'm going to try it local first. If it goes okay with that first run I may repeat again in another venue.
Unfortunately Newport is about 3 hours drive away for me,
I have just started a City and Guilds Adult Education Training Course and teaching people about Steemit definitely something I'd like to do too. I don't know where to get content for one from as yet (without research), but this is such an amazing idea. You are a trendsetter :)
Thank you @hopehuggs for your support with this.
You will have to give me some teaching guidance. I have done a bit of TEFL and maths teaching in different places around the world but I have never been trained as a teacher.
I will be relying on enthusiam and love of steemit to hopefully carry me through with this.
There is a lot of great content on steemit so I will be asking around to see what I can use.
I'm a professor in my real-life! If you need help but I have never taught online.
Thank you - very useful to know. What subject do you teach?
architecture, nothing to do with cookery or computing or crytocurrencies or anything like that
I've been thinking of doing something like this locally...
You are welcome to use / adapt / improve on any notes I develop.
Thank you!
This is a supurb idea, I like the content you want to present and it all seems damn well thought out. Recently I was also pondering about having a Steemit workshop at a rave/festival! The only thing with that is that no one would have laptops, so maybe I could just promote it with another workshop.
As for location and having computers for everyone to use, why not a library or school with computers?
I bookmarked this post so I can refer back to it if I ever feel ambitious enough to do such a course, it is a very helpful outline, thank you!
Yes a library could be a possibility. The library in our nearest big town has a computer suite that can be hired - not sure how much though. But it is an hour's drive away, so I may do a smaller scale local venue first to see how it goes.
Update us on how it goes! I am interested for sure. Thanks too for this inspiring post!
Will do, thank you.
Newport library would be great! Really nice venue or the Riverside Art Centre.
Unfortunately a bit too far for an initial run of the course - about 3 hours drive.
I don't think the course needs to be done with a computer because for most people the concept of blockchain and cryptocurrency are very unfamiliar and how this ties into something like Steemit is still confusing for newcomers. In fact I think an introduction to blockchain and cryptocurrency will make the rest of the content easier to digest and understand.
The course will be hands on. People will be keen to make posts and get votes.
This is a great idea. Getting more people onto the platform raises the tide for everyone. I like the syllabus and the deposit idea and I think there would be a lot of interest :)
If Jean-Luc likes the idea, I'd better make it so...
This is a great initiative, and I think something that teachers and educators on the #steemiteducation and #education channels will support. Are you also interested in setting up an online course? Happy to contribute if you need a hand with anything because I will be happy for some of the infographics I produced previously to be used for this :)
I think there are so many different aspects to Steemit that you might consider splitting the course into getting setup on Steemit and more involved topics like posting and creating content because it is best tailored to specific interests (e.g. if you are interested in photography then steepshot is probably going to be of more interest, and dtube if they like videos, and dmania for memes, etc.).
The goal could be to try and get someone up and running first, and then getting to to produce content (and the networking is just a natural part of how they engage with communities and other users).
Once I have done the course once I am sure it will evolve.
Thank you for the offer on the infographics.
It might evolve into an online course but then it goes towards Udemy territory...
I agree, I think face-to-face is the best way to communicate and teach :)
👍
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That is great, thank you.
This is such a good idea. You could record an online video by recording your computer screen with a desktop recorder which with a microphone you could record your own voice.
Or do online training events too on tools like GoToMeeting? Therefore more users could get involved?
I will probably do a simple trial run first and see how it goes.
That is assuming I find anyone wanting to do the course in my little corner of Wales.