Stackable Learning Pathways

Empower kids by giving them agency over STEM learning pathways with stackable and verifiable digital credentials (W3C VC-Edu).

MBA, ex-SanDisk PM, Entrepreneur | Maker Education | Telstra DevOps | full-stack developer | We are in the Atala PRISM Pioneer program.

Executive Summary

We believe that Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) technology would have the biggest social impact if it is widely adopted in primary and secondary education.

To drive mass adoption and accelerate decentralised identity it's fundamental to uncover repeatable use patterns in education. Due to their flexibility, non-accredited STEM educational programs offer a significant opportunity to reveal such patterns.

We'll use our makerspace and work together with other program providers to accelerate the documentation of use cases and guarantee a user-centric development of subsequent features.

This project is the first small step towards UN sustainable development goal (SDG) 4 - Quality Education. A coming future of prosperity and abundance where knowledge and abilities/skills become transferable assets, much like digital assets.

Background and motivation

The idea started from Leo's personal experience with the struggle of fitting into formal education in Japan. After dropping out at 13 years old due to a lack of challenging courses, he utilized the growing movement of free open-source courses (MOOCs) from universities overseas.

However, a disconnect between educational resources and globally recognized certifications meant that he still had to go through several rounds of standardized testing, which was not only expensive, hard to access and time-consuming, but also didn't provide any space to showcase his ability in programming or specialized knowledge from MOOCs. With these kinds of difficulties arising in a wealthy country, it's not hard to imagine the kinds of challenges and barriers holding back bright, self-motivated kids in developing regions around the world.

Problem Statement

[From a student perspective]

As we move towards a more interconnected and globalized world, students from underrepresented backgrounds are falling behind. As educational entities navigate the digital transformation, their paper certifications become fragile and short-lived.

Primary and secondary school students are exposed to a myriad of extracurricular workshops, excursions, maker fairs, and many more educational experiences during the school years. However, such experiences are rendered futile by the time they have to start university or polytechnic. There's no secure way to document their learning journey, nor a way to bring this agency to the student – strengthening their individual identity.

The Laboratory for the Science of Individuality at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has demonstrated that there is no average student. Students' interests are variable and change over time responding to external influences. A kid's development is extremely nuanced and there should be room for exploration in terms of education pathways.

The future of work will require professionals that understand multiple disciplines and how they relate to each other. And yet, we push our children through a linear progression model with a universal sequence that pays no respect to their individual variability. This average-based model leaves many kids with low self-esteem because they are not good at exams.

What if the youth could own their educational pathway? What if they had the agency to seek their own interests? And what if, by the time they have to decide on what next step to take, they had documentation in their hands that would help them self-guide?

What's wrong with the existing education infrastructure?

Learning is often not a linear process, but it's still viewed that way by formal education institutions.

Think of learning across a few dimensions, according to Learning Economy Foundation —

• Formality: University → MOOCs → Long form → Short form (Tik Tok etc)

• Atomicity: Bulk credentials (diploma) → Certificate → Skill

• Ownership: Owned by institution → Co-owned → Owned by the learner

• Timing: Premeditated → On-demand

Our target users

Verifiable Credential Receiver (Holder)

K-12 Students that are engaging with non-accredited STEM programs.

• Maintain a compelling and verifiable record of student lifelong learning achievements to share with employers (i.e. internships)

• Receive credentials digitally and safely

• Own all credentials forever without having to ask for a certificate ever again

Verifiable Credential Issuer

EduTech providers working with non-accredited STEM courses. We'll incubate this pilot in-house at FABA*

*FABA - educational makerspace that we operate in Melbourne, Australia

• Keep and distribute learner records in a way that is easy, safe, and inexpensive

• Remove the risk of identity fraud

• Issue multiple credentials to a single learner easily, using the same streamlined process

The market

Micro-credentials and digital badges have been used for over a decade. Open Badges alone issued 43.3 million badges in 2020. Kids are exposed to badges and credentials at a very young age, and that's one of the first documents they gather that shapes their identity.

Across Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) programs, excursions, and extracurricular workshops for K-12 students, there's no standard record keeping. Young students have fragile and paper certifications that are not portable.

First and foremost, there's a market gap in regards to a digital repository of granular formal and informal educational experiences. Moreover, the few solutions live in extremely centralized institutions on centralized databases.

A kid's learning achievements should belong to them, and the first Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) that onboard a user at a young age will become his or her gateway to Web3 and Metaverse.

The EduTech sector is growing like never - As of 10 Aug 2021, there are now 30 EduTech Unicorns around the world who have collectively raised over $20B of total funding in the last decade and are now collectively valued at $90B.

University entry requirements are moving towards skill-based admission criteria. More and more universities are considering extracurricular skills and demonstrated interests during their admission process.

However, anything "non-accredited" during a kid's time in school has no registration whatsoever. Nontraditional pathways are overlooked, and children who pursue such pathways are perceived as outliers.

The role of badges for DIDs and VCs mass-adoption

In order to drive mass adoption, we intend to bring non-accredited STEM badges to the Cardano ecosystem. We'll conform to the latest OpenBadges 3.0 specification (IMS Global Learning Consortium). K-12 students will open their first wallet in order to receive digital credentials related to the educational programs they participate in (hour of code, excursion to a makerspace, etc.).

Badges can play a crucial role in the connected learning ecology by acting as a bridge between contexts and making these alternative learning pathways and skills more portable and impactful. Key benefits include but are not limited to:

Capturing and translating the learning across contexts:

• Capturing of the Learning Path

• Achievement Signaling

Encouraging and motivating participation and learning outcomes:

• Motivation

• Supporting Innovation and Flexibility

Formalizing and enhancing existing social aspects of informal and interest-driven learning:

• Identity/Reputation Building

• Community Building/Kinship

In order to incentivize students to engage with STEM outside traditional education, badges play a crucial role in supporting the documentation of a student's journey.

Our vision

Every child in the world should have access to affordable and personalized STEM education.

SSI tech - DIDs and VCs - enable true digital ownership and control of each student's accomplishments that are immutable, easily verified, and globally recognized.

Achieving inclusive and quality education for all reaffirms the belief that education is one of the most powerful and proven vehicles for UN SDGs. This project is the first small step towards UN SDG 4 - Quality Education.

What we'll do during Fund7

We'll run targeted user research to uncover and document repeatable patterns in use cases, specifically focusing on non-accredited and after-school STEM programs.

We'll specifically implement a framework called Game Thinking. This framework was developed by Amy Jo Kim (The Sims, Rock Band, Netflix, Happify, and others), and builds upon the intrinsic motivation of learning something new and upskilling. This framework relies on diligent user research to find and categorize super-fans (The narrow slice of Innovators + Early Adopters) to co-develop a narrow skill-building path.

With the support of Amy Jo Kim (The Sims, Rock Band, Netflix, Happify, and others), we've successfully implemented pattern-uncovering techniques to build and ship EduTech solutions. We'll implement the same user research framework with non-accredited STEM program providers (including ourselves).

Our team

Hans Chang, ex-SanDisk PM, entrepreneur, Maker Education

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanschang/

Bernardo Mendonca, EdTech, Maker Education, product

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mendonca-bernardo/

Leo Lloyd, full-stack developer, user research, UX

https://www.linkedin.com/in/leo-lloyd/

Austin John, enterprise DevOps and big data infrastructure

https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinjohn1/

Advisors and working groups

• Mario Altimari (CTO consultant/advisor) working with xAPI

https://www.linkedin.com/in/altimario/

• Lance Byrd - Open Source Credential Wallet

https://www.linkedin.com/in/2byrds/

• W3C VC-Edu

https://github.com/w3c-ccg/vc-ed

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Milestones and Deliverables

February/2022

• We'll work with [Code.org](http://Code.org) and HolonIQ to Build a list of 100 EduTech companies that have some issuing steps in their educational delivery.

• We'll reach out to these companies and use a screening questionnaire to map 20 companies who have the potential to be early adopters.

• We'll open source these lists and the questionnaire for future research.

[Requirements]List building - 40 hoursOutreach - 24 hoursSpeed Interviewing (2-3 open questions) questionnaire setup - 8 hoursScreening - 8 hours**Admin - 2 hoursTotal hours - 82 hours**LinkedIn lead-gen premium = 2 * U$780

March/2022

• We'll interview 5 EduTech providers that are issuing non-accredited course credentials and are potential early adopters of verifiable credentials.

• Using game thinking techniques to find superfans within institutions like Arduino and Micro:Bit

• Video and transcripts uploaded

• Documentation of core activities (Outcomes / Activities)

[Requirements]Interview - 20 hoursAdmin (transcription set up and upload videos) - 8 hours**Use case documentation - 16 hoursTotal hours - 44 hours**3 months of Reduct Video - U$500

April/2022

• We'll define the epics based on the research conducted with the EduTech providers

• Delivery of epics/user stories to open-source wallet team

• We'll upload the use case to the VC-EDU Community working group.

• Playtest

[Requirements]
Epic definition - 16 hours
Admin - 2 hours
Playtest preparation - 1 day - 8 hours
Playtest outreach - 5 hours
Playtest - 2 days, 8 hours per day, 2 people - 32 hours
-
Total - 63 hours

May/2022

• Prototype a story beat playtest (pen and paper) that will be run with the 5 EduTech providers

• Run story beat playtest with EduTech providers

[Requirements]

Prototype - 16 hours
Storybeats playtest = 2*5 - 10 hours
Admin time for documentation - 2 hours
Admin for transcription and upload - 8 hours
Total - 36 hours

June/2022

• We'll run a proof-of-concept by issuing VCs to students that undertake a STEM course at our makerspace.

• 2 classes of 26 students each (on average)

[Requirements]1 day preparation2 day execution**1 day documentationTotal - 4 * 8 = 32 hours

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Q&As

• Why Is It Important?

We are part of the Atala Prism Pioneer Program, and we've been constantly coordinating with other tems that are working on the credential wallets and other projects. Repeatable use patterns are still concealed and this hinders the development of user-centric features. We hope to support such projects by providing concise use cases and user stories that can be converted into features.

• What Does Success Look Like?

We expect to identify extremely repeatable use patterns within the non-formal, non-accredited educational ecosystem. This encompasses millions of users worldwide and it's an untapped use case. By uncovering, documenting, and communicating the most effective ways to work with these end-users we expect to significantly increase the adoption of decentralised identity and verifiable credentials.

• What specific key measure are you focusing on here?

We are focusing on the Discovery of repeatable patterns in use-cases.

• How can I see your progress?

If funded, we'll set up a page for the project and release biweekly updates.

Moreover, we expect to be active in the discord channel and Cardano town hall meetings.

• Is this project going to be open source?

Yes, our user research outputs will be made public. This includes video recordings, transcripts, user mapping, etc.

The specific use cases will be made available to the W3C vc-edu working group.

• When is your expected launch date?

Since this project focus on applied research, each step of the way we'll have a compartmentalized deliverable that is ready to be used (recorded interviews, transcripts, user stories, etc.). Each deliverable is specified under the "Milestones and Deliverables" section.

• I have questions, how can I reach out?

You can always find us through hello@fab9.com.au or individually via our LinkedIn profiles (Provided in a previous section)