e-Learning DAO, Builds the platform

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

PREFACE

THIS PROPOSAL IS NOT ABOUT BUILDING A FULL REVENUE SHARING POLICY FOR THE E-LEARNING PLATFORM (here https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/416182). In this first iteration, the platform can survive also with a really basic sharing policy.

In THIS proposal, we are looking for economic support for building the decentralised e-Learning platform that has built-in systems for:

1. economic sustainability
2. shared ownership
3. verification of acquired knowledge
4. incentivisation of collaborative creation

SUMMARY OF THE PROBLEM

3rd generation blockchain is not designed only for storing value, Defi and NFT but it is for real-life things and for public good like e-Learning. 

Everybody knows the damage of centralised power on social media, but there is also another field in danger for the same reason. It's online learning. Years ago we considered it a great opportunity for humanity, a tool for the democratisation of knowledge. Unfortunately e-Learning today is mainly an invasion of cheap video courses and silly tutorials.

Learning online is not the future, it is the present, and it has to be in the hands of the users and not monopolised by centralised Ed-Tech giants.

THE SOLUTION

We created e-Learning DAO and with its growing treasury, we are building a decentralised e-Learning platform.

The platform is based on 3 main components PoLiL, POCRE and BOUNDER. Two components are already funded (Fund 7 and 8) and in development (PoLiL and POCRE). The missing component to build is BOUNDER and it is proposed on Fund 9.

Platform components explanation:

1. PoLiL stores user learning journey in Cardano (with a proper strategy on and off-chain) - Partially FUNDED
2. POCRE acknowledge collaborative authorship for any kind of learning material - FUNDED
3. BOUNDER is where the money comes from, it redistributes across all stakeholders, the winnings from the bets on the questions of the course - WAITING FUNDS

In this Fund 9, we are looking for funds for a detailed definition of revenue sharing (including workflow and percentage of ownership for developers).

• e-Learning DAO revenue shared, https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/416182 ($10000)

but also for funding the main component which will drive revenues

• Like Kahoot - Quiz and bet with ADA, https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/416192 (in the diagram it is called BOUNDER, Bet On UNDERstanding) ($39500)

WHAT TO DO

So, if all the components are there what is still missing and what is required in order to build this decentralised e-Learning platform?

We cannot pretend to rebuild Moodle (the most famous open-source learning management system), it could cost millions of dollars and years of work. However, we can create modular and autonomous components that interact with the Cardano blockchain and the users' data stored.

The learning materials can be located everywhere, from youtube to IPFS, but how these materials are linked need to have published in a new Dapp (the same as the assessments for the knowledge verification).

A tool for the "teachers" to link the materials in a pedagogical order and in a collaborative way, has to be developed. Same as a tool for the learners to release feedback at any stage of the learning progress.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Here are some wireframes to visualise how it could look like

However, these things are relatively straightforward, what instead is not immediate is proving knowledge from any source of the learning process, from online courses to training on the job, mixing and matching unrelated competencies and experiences.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Ultimately, what matters to the Cardano ecosystem is sustainability, meaning enough ADA transactions.

This platform will increase enormously the amount of ADA coming from DAOs transaction fees, because THIS MARKET IS HUGE AND IT IS GROWING EXPONENTIALLY.

EdTech projected global market size to $181.3B by 2025

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/educational-technology-ed-tech-market-1066.html

and to $377.85 Billion by 2028

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-education-technology-market

List of the 15 Largest EdTech Companies in the World:

15. Boxlight Corporation (NASDAQ: BOXL)

14. Course Hero

13. ApplyBoard

12. Stride, Inc. (NYSE: LRN)

11. Unacademy

10. Duolingo

9. Coursera, Inc. (NYSE: COUR)

8. 2U, Inc. (NASDAQ: TWOU)

7. Udemy

6. VIPKID

5. Zuoyebang

4. BYJU'S

3. Chegg, Inc. (NYSE: CHGG)

2. Yuanfudao

1. Kahoot! AS (Oslo: KAHOT.OL)

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-largest-edtech-companies-world-155126885.html

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-largest-edtech-companies-in-the-world-930988

Obviously, we are not here just because of the money, we want to do something good in our life for the benefit of those who come next.

These are other achievements we can reach in the social and pedagogical areas.

1- Achievement of DECENTRALISATION at any level

What is decentralised in this e-Learning platform:

• is not only the learning material located everywhere (online)
• is not just the user learning data not anymore centralised in Coursera (sorry Coursera it is just an example, you are not worst than many others out there)
• even the release of the certification itself is no longer centralised. Anybody (recognised as an authority from the community) can say: "in order to be acknowledged as competent on the topic X, you need to: learn A, do B and pass C". Where A could be a video course, B a coding exercise, C an essay with a good rate. Coursera (sorry again), will not store anymore your certification in PDF. This PDF will not exist anymore, because obsolete. And Coursera (you evil) will not define anymore what is necessary to learn for competence acknowledgement. 

2- Achievement of REPUTATION of curricula

We can achieve the reputation of curricula based on effective user learning data using the whole history of transactions, instead of just relying on the brand/prestige of institutions (public or private) as today we are used to doing.

A typical certification becomes old, after a certain amount of time. When the user is asked to be re-certified following an updated course, the studying process restarts, often from scratch, even if the materials are mostly the same. By contrast, the learner can update old material in a granular manner, directly with the new one, making the re-certification an obsolete process.

3- Achievement of EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

Assuming you want to be certified in "Advanced Management Program" from MIT, but you cannot be there because you live in Africa, especially you cannot afford to pay $65000 because you receive a salary based on the African market (by the way I can't afford it as well :-D ), the job of your dream is precluded forever. But what if there is a nice guy that publishes online all the materials where you can learn things and show your clever employer that your certification is equally comparable (and maybe better if the community evolves it)?

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Like every project in the Cardano ecosystem, the risk is always in finding the human resources who write the code. Haskell/Plutus is not common knowledge and because of that, the few developers available are extremely expensive.

This is one of the reasons why we created "e-Learning DAO", to offer not only remuneration for the developers but also ownership of what is built. It should make the scenario more attractive to them.

In the future, less and less developers will work for the "boss" (unless super paid). Many others will receive income from shared ownership of the platforms. WEB 3 is also this.

Another risk is being not voted by asking for "too much" money (unless you are a recognised brand in the Cardano ecosystem). A potential solution to this limitation is to split the project into smaller proposals (as much as possible autonomous). That's why we have in Fund 9 these 3 proposals that work in tandem:

• e-Learning DAO revenue shared, https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/416182
• Like Kahoot - Quiz and bet with ADA, https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/416192

HOW DO GET PEOPLE TO ADOPT THE SOLUTION

We will build a website (useful also for tracking the progress of the development) where users can play with a demo account.

When the solution is stable and solid, we can start to do partnerships and marketing campaigns.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

ACTION PLAN

Milestone 1 (2 months):

• Wireframing all the use cases (for teacher/verifier and student)
• Define detailed workflows
• Build the design
• Build the user interface
• Publish a website for progress tracking and marketing
• Create a simple video explanation for marketing purpose

Milestone 2 (2 months):

• Build a micro Content Management System designed for :

1. editing/publishing course description
2. editing/publishing correlated links of learning material and assessment that represent the course
3. pricing each learning material, assessment and knowledge verification
4. manage feedback from learners to content and verifier

• identification of the different competencies to mix and match, with a related grade of verification, in order to release the certification/acknowledgement

Milestone 3 (2 months):

• Integrate a browser wallet like Nami for more expert users
• Integrate optionally payment processes via the credit card with AdaPay or a similar tool
• Create a learner profile area accessible via wallet, in order to interact with materials and give feedback
• Track in a dashboard the learner bookmark, progress and achievement
• Generate the certification (as a document in the wallet) with the list of all the learning materials exposed, who were the authors of the materials, when the exposition happened, when the verification passed, what grade was achieved, and who verified
• Test and bugfix

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

BUDGET BREAKDOWN

Requested fund: $55000

Number of designers/UX/UI needed: 1 - (Monthly salary average: $2500)

Number of project managers/coordinators: 1 - (Monthly salary average: $2500)

Number of Web developers needed: 2 - (Monthly salary average: $3000)

Number of Haskell/Plutus developers needed: 2 - (Monthly salary average: $3500)

Estimated duration per milestone: 2 months

Estimated length of the project: 6 months

Cost for production of a video explanation: $1000

Extra costs including a year of cloud services: $1000

TOT COST PER DEVELOPER

Designer/UX/UI/website, 2 months of work, tot cost $5000

Haskell/Plutus developer, 3 months of work, tot cost $21000

Web developer, 4 months of work, tot cost $12000

Project manager/coordinator, 6 months of work, tot cost $15000

P.S.

For the Proposal Assessor (ex Community Advisor) concerned about the low budget required. This amount required is good enough for a decent development of the tool proposed. Obviously, making it fully featured could cost much much more, but I am convinced this is not the scope of Catalyst. If in the future there is enough traction for this product, I'm sure money will come from different sources.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

My name is Mario Altimari (https://www.linkedin.com/in/altimario) and I'm working full-time for the Cardano ecosystem in the e-Learning space, which I believe is one of the most important for the people's good.

The last May I quit my job where I was CTO of a successful international e-learning AI company, with several patents. I have 22+ years of experience in IT, I started my career as a software developer in the far 1999. I was a forerunner in 2006 of distance learning solution, participating in building the Italian Government e-learning platform “FAD” (Formazione A Distanza). I'm passionate about open source and data stream processing on distributed systems, that's why I built “Data Cruncher” https://github.com/AltiMario/DataCruncher the 1st data quality firewall on the market.

I love functional programming and am proficient in it with Clojure, I'm currently converting to Haskell.

I'm hands-on with everything, from architecture design to project management and coding.

• Alfredo, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredo-gemma

Researcher in Cybernetics and Deep Learning, currently CTO of AI company with several patents and published papers on the field of data compression and speech recognition. Alfredo wrote the paper “Measuring Conversational Fluidity in Automated Dialogue Agents” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.11790.pdf and “Fine-Grained Named Entity Recognition using ELMo and Wikidata” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.10503.pdf. He has more than 20 years of experience in the design and development of AI, including Distributed, Concurrent and Iterative Computing, Fuzzy Logic systems, Inferential Systems, Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computing, Network Security, Cryptographic Systems, Intrusion Detection and Hack-Proofing techniques.

Alfredo is our technical advisor.

• Bruno, https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunobonacci

Ex Apple, ex Cisco. Data Architect, High Volume Distributed Systems engineer, low-latency, Machine Learning. Tireless Open-source contributors. Functional programming guru using Clojure. 20+ years of commercial experience in IT.

Bruno is our technical advisor.

• Tasnia, https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~01f50ad6cae904ee2b is a Social Media Marketer with 6 years of experience in Twitter Marketing, Discord Marketing, NFT Marketing. Currently, she is involved in our Twitter campaign for @eLearningDAO

This is the main list of the hands-on contributors of e-Learning DAO who will develop this proposal:

https://github.com/ing-Hugo : Hugo is a junior Haskell/Plutus developer

https://github.com/kritical0613 : Dennis is a senior full-stack developer with some blockchain exposition

https://github.com/GruDev325 : Jax is a senior full-stack developer expert in blockchain

https://github.com/mrron313 : Arif is a front-end developer

https://vimeo.com/catchyanimations : Vinail is a web designer, animator and video creator

A growing list of code contributors is here:

https://github.com/orgs/e-Learning-DAO/people

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

yes, building a brand new e-learning platform is a huge task but somehow predictable in terms of costs and time, however, inventing new processes for the decentralisation is not something deeply experimented with, which means we could need extra support on the way.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

This decentralised e-Learning platform is an open-source solution, which means the audibility is guaranteed by definition through open commits, pull requests, and bug tracking (we use GitHub).

However, we will also create a website containing information about the progress and the status of the development.

As part of the open development process, we are managing the development via GitHub projects, this is for POLIL as an example of how the platform is progressing in transparency

and obviously via GitHub tickets

We will use gitcoin (and/or snapbrillia as bounties when they are ready) to engage other developers outside of our network.

In order to coordinate the development activities, we have created e-Learning DAO Discord Server, open to anyone interested in participating and/or just monitoring

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

• Teachers receive passive income, through the DAO, from the content created, every time a student land on it
• Publishers receive passive income, through the DAO, from the content hosted and displayed
• Verifiers receive passive income, through the DAO, when learners proved to have mastered concepts
• Software developers receive passive income, through the DAO, from the portion of the code create and maintained, in relation to a feature/function the student used
• Learners, paying the DAO, learn and they show certification of the knowledge at any stage

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

It is an entirely new proposal.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

SDG goals:

Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

SDG subgoals:

4.4 By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

4.4.1 Proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill

#proposertoolsdg