Study Buddy 3.0

Engage with learners in Cardano community to test a proof-of-concept of a way for learners to peer-validate that is truly decentralized.

Team has experience in instructional design, LMS admin, course development, classroom teaching, online facilitation, curriculum and assessment in K-12 and post-secondary including credentialed health science education; extensive web development experience.

[IMPACT]

Individuals wishing to pursue their own learning goals will be grouped with others learning at approximately their own level and area of interest in groups of three. These groups will be faciliated through a simple but rigorous structure involving self-reflection and peer-validation, making use of NFT "proofs-of-progress" and group learning contracts. Learners will not only be able to benefit from the peer support of working in a group, but will be able to earn validation for their self-selected study accomplishments.

The kind of data resulting from this kind of NFT-based, qualitative assessment will in many cases be more educationally valid than results from standardized testing, because it tells a bigger story of the learning. Individuals will be able to share their NFT evidence of competency with for example potential employers. This evidence will be a rich supplement to conventional certification, should the individual wish to share it e.g. along with their resume.

The project will test specific use cases with actual people in the Cardano community; therefore it will contribute overall to the goal of education about Cardano, blockchain and related topics.

This model will be an alternative way to think of certification of all kinds of formal and informal learning; therefore potentially millions of people could enter the Cardano ecosystem.

How does this proposal align with the Cardano vision, and the Accelerating Decentralized Identity Challenge criteria?

First let’s imagine a future state of Study Buddy 3.0 as a vast network of individuals who have been interacting in a distributed but highly structured way. These individuals are demonstrably accomplishing their individual learning goals in three-person groups. They connect with others in the network to continue learning with the same or with different groups. Through the NFT-based validation process and a simple keyword search, individuals find and interact with others of greater and lesser knowledge in similar subject areas. This network thus becomes the biggest and most distributed school on the planet. 

Such a network will support the Challenge criteria both in general and specific terms.

General Criteria

Like the Challenge itself, we draw inspiration from the principles from ‘patterns of commoning.’ Realizing our vision of a distributed/decentralized network of connected learners will be an example of “ innovation … linking communities with shared interests under these principles” in a truly embodied and tangible way, concretely linking individuals precisely through their shared interests, and bringing this expanded knowledge back to their communities. 

Paraphrasing patterns of commoning as expressed by David Harvey, the Study Buddy 3.0 network of learning groups will “establish a social relation with a common whose uses are either exclusive to a social group or partially or fully open to all and sundry.” The distributed Study Buddy network will not belong to any one organization, but rather will truly be a “common,” a space and resource shared by all. 

The Study Buddy 3.0 model remains “off-limits to the logic of [the] market” in that the learning is defined by the learners themselves. Not bound to but able to support institutional curricula.

Harvey, David (2012). Rebel cities : from the right to the city to the urban revolution. New York: Verso. p. 73. ISBN 978-1-84467-882-2. OCLC 767564397.

Specific Criteria

High-value alternative credentials

Again let’s imagine the network in its developed state. Individuals have created in NFT form very granular pieces of evidence of their competencies. These individuals then share this evidence as they wish. Mostly we assume the main use will be to accompany more traditional i.e. certificate or degree-based evidence of learning issued by learning institutions. 

The Study Buddy 3.0 NFT-based evidence will be a high-value credential, by virtue of its solid validation, focused granularity, versatility, shareability, and freshness. This kind of credential will be an alternative to accredited education and career paths. As individuals in the community create a body of work in the form of NFTs that show and tell their competencies, they’ll be able to maintain their reputation as a skilled employee, laborer, consultant, mentor, teacher, etc.

Self-Governing

We are already considering mechanisms for challenging given validations. Since the system is self-selected and self-validating, these mechanisms will be a way for the community to self-heal and self-monitor for bad actors, harmful actions, or bad outcomes.

Creating and Maintaining Community

The network of individuals creating these credentials will be a self-governing emergent community, all sharing the common resources of a peer-validated ecosystem. This will be a real-world implementation on Cardano with a virtually unlimited scope.

Through the Study Buddy 3.0 structure, learners will be able to demonstrate their competencies directly to those interested e.g. employers, thus being able to bypass institutions. As such these individuals will be able to negotiate as a community for better terms to have the values of their competencies recognized, distributed, and sold with value intact. 

And finally, since the Study Buddy 3.0 structure will apply to virtually any kind of learning at any level, it will constitute an exciting discovery of repeatable patterns in a huge number of potential specific use-cases.

All in all, Study Buddy 3.0 presents a model for educational interaction and assessment that supports and extends the principles of Cardano and of the Accelerating Decentralized Identity Challenge in tangible ways. 

The initial challenge is to attract a number (30-35) learners to participate in an activity to enhance learning they're already doing, with a model that is unfamiliar and in an informal environment that doesn't compel learners to participate.

Our mitigation strategy is to canvas within the Cardano community and outside. Within, we've already made connections with the Cardano School, and are exploring running our "Study Buddy 3.0" program with course groups there. We will also canvas on Reddit, forum.cardano, Discord, and in Telegram groups.

We are also proposing a podcast on a broader range of Cardano-based projects. We will invite audience members to consolidate their learning and meet others in the community through this free activity.

We are also continuing to explore this methodology with people we know in our local geographical community who are engaged in learning.

Additionally in the budget we are asking for honoraria for participants. Ultimately we are envisaging learners being rewarded for learning with some kind of token. This "paper pilot" of token economy aspects, and also contractual aspect are lessons we hope to take away from this project.

[FEASIBILITY]

Months 1 and 2

• Form learning pods (groups of three) - Recruit from Cardano community and beyond.
• Orient learners to goals of this project, what to expect, agreements for participation and logistic details.
• Orient learners to simple protocol for creating and sharing educational "proof-of-progress" learning artifacts.
• Learning groups create first (of three) Proof-of-Progress videos
• Make weekly updates in podcast social media (i.e. Rumble, Discord, Reddit)

Months 3 and 4

• Continue to support learning groups
• Explore concept of tokenization of Proof-of-Progress NFT with the cohort
• Learning groups complete their agreed-to learning artifacts and share them.
• Make weekly updates continue in media channels

Months 5 and 6

• Reflect on the entire project and identify lessons learned, including some qualitative research of learner artifacts created. We publish our reflections in media channels and a final report.

TOTAL $8215

Please see attached PDF.

Michael has done instructional design, LMS admin, course development, classroom teaching, online facilitation, curriculum and assessment in K-12 and post-secondary including credentialed health science education. He has recently been networking with Catalyst School organizers and others in Cardano community.

https://sites.google.com/view/michael-cenkner-portfolio/home

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-cenkner/

Paul has extensive web development experience as a marketing consultant since 2013. His work introduced him to business automation using complex user input interfaces (web-based forms, prompts, etc) to provide automated actions.

For the past 15 years, he has studied law as a hobby, focusing on the common law and contract law and how it relates to self-governance.

Today, he teaches communities these principles to help them establish a model of decentralization in every aspect of their lives.

In his words, “To the degree that communities can self govern their education is the degree that the nation can build hallmarks of civility that safeguard the people’s freedom.”

Open to collaboration!

This project will depend on the involvement of Cardano community members who have some kind of “learning agenda” to carry out. This could be related to topics we will present in our Cardano-focused podcast, or Catalyst school projects, or it could be individuals’ personal interests e.g. in blockchain.

Interested Cardano community members with background in the following areas are welcome to get in touch for potential collaboration, either in this project or in our related podcast project.

[AUDITABILITY]

• Number of learners involved
• Duration and instances of their involvement
• Number of artifacts created in the agreed-to time frames
• Number of updates and notifications sent out
• Number of facilitative messages and announcements exchanged with learners and others
• Number of collaborators involved
• A final report to be created and shared.

Within the Cardano community

• One or multiple (up to 12) learning groups are formed and test the model
• Several individuals complete the agreed-to activities
• We are able to analyse and synthesize our own learnings
• We present our findings in various formal and informal channels
• We engage with community members on related topics including Curriculum and assessment, Token economy, Online teaching and facilitation, Smart contracts.

See this video for an idea of the learning experience https://rumble.com/vwtsua-integrated-learning-experiences-for-decentralized-assessment.html

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