This is the 3rd and final part of a short 3 piece series, where a co-founder of BitDegree, Danielius Stasiulis, shares his views on why Blockchain will reinvent Education.

To accomplish the objectives it has set itself, BitDegree will use blockchain in numerous ways. However, the most important use of all, the token incentive, acting as a social contract, has to be explained in depth before other uses can be presented.

Programmable token incentive as a trust-less social contract for education

BitDegree will soon do a simple, yet monumental thing — attach the BDG token to the online courses. This will allow learners to get tokens as a reward for completing courses — a token incentive. It will also enable anyone to incentivize learners to study what they want. The course creators and tutors will get paid through the same incentive. It is a social contract for education on blockchain through BDG token incentive.

Below, we have described the majority of ways how token transactions are happening between the three parties involved.

1. Gamification of the learning process

Ever stopped to think why some mobiles games seem so addictive? You just want to play even if you don’t find it particularly fun or enjoyable. They achieve this by rewarding progression, one of the leading issues education faces is that you can’t measure your progress. It’s tough to see if the time you’ve invested gave you results. That’s why micro-rewards and sense of progression are so important. Humans feel the need to think that they’re always moving forward. Therefore, even something as small as seeing a progress bar move or investing your time because you know you’ll get rewarded once you reach a certain point is crucial.

BitDegree aims to do for education what mobile phones did for gaming. Keep people motivated, excited and wanting more! That’s the core of learn and earn. Instead of using worthless in-game currency you earn BDG tokens.

Let’s look at it from the learners perspective.

It is much more appealing to take the course if it offers a reward — the BDG token incentive;

The learner is motivated to finish the course in order to get the reward;

The reward can be spreadout throughout the course, incentivizing effort at different stages or hardships of learning — tasks, challenges, exams.

The reward (or the future reward) can be shared with those who help to finish the course — the tutors and mentors.

Because this reward is the BDG token it has the following crypto/blockchain features:

It is a trustless contract between the reward creator, the learner, the tutor and the course author engaged in the process;

It is a cryptocurrency — it is the value that can reach any part of the globe instantaneously without institutional frictions;

It is an immutable record that certifies the achievement of the learner and can be verified.

2. A better medium of exchange for online learning

The BitDegree tokens are accessible to anyone in any country of the world. Reaching a wider audience and making transactions easier. Furthermore, using smart-contracts for the transactions make it trustless. You’re always sure that you’ll get the reward and your sponsor won’t back out. The settlement between the incentive provider and the learner is guaranteed. Tracking individual scholarships and sponsors via traditional currency is hard. Putting in the effort to figure out who is that you’re sponsoring, and that the money is reaching their bank is even harder. Blockchain makes it easy and trustless.

Why not simply use ETH? Two reasons: 1) through BDG token we offer shared upside to anyone who contributes to making the platform better, 2) BDG token will be tailored to track data relevant to educational achievements.

3. Blockchain-based certificates and achievement tracking

The blockchain can serve as a verifiable personal ledger of educational achievements. Upon completion of each course, the learner’s achievement is recorded on the blockchain through a token transaction that also has the data about the achievement. When learners take many courses, their learning record on the blockchain becomes their personal ledger of micro-achievements and BitDegrees. It’s like a CV of what you have learned, but it is reliable, secure and public to the extent that you want and need.

Moreover, certificates and achievements are applicable not only to learners but also to educators and employers. All of their performance and feedback is made public.

4. A fair and transparent model of income for the course creators

As opposed to other online education platforms, BitDegree provides an opportunity for course creators to participate in the success of the platform through earning and holding the BDG tokens. Moreover, BitDegree’s token economy model will be transparent to everyone and the stakeholders’ opinion will be of paramount importance when tweaking it. If the system is trustless and transparent, everyone can be sure that they’re being treated fairly. All of the payments are available publicly and content creators can rest assured knowing that everything is handled automatically and transparently. No human error.

5. Blockchain encourages the community to contribute

Earn and spend tokens on/for mentorship/tutoring and support. When you’re incentivized to help out others, it’s more likely that you’ll do so. Our vision is to have a community that actively shares the collective knowledge and helps its members to learn.

6. Major network effects — crowdfunding and crowdsourcing education

Major network effects come from mobilizing the community for maintaining and updating the best possible learning methods and courses. Like Wikipedia has crowdsourced the world’s knowledge, so can BitDegree create incentives for educators, learners, and employers to crowdsource and crowd-maintain the online education system.

This gives the community an opportunity to ask for courses it wants and have the educators to create them. Also, it enables the educators to crowdfund the courses they want to create in a Kickstarter fashion. Lastly, the community together is stronger than all of the world’s universities combined — it can afford to have the most extensive array of courses and the most advanced teaching methods.

Concluding remarks

While the vision for the future is nice and appealing, the path to getting there is not straightforward at all. Here, I have provided my views of what BitDegree could become, however, it’s up to the entire team to decide where to focus our attention and energy as we go forward. Even if we achieve only some of the things from the list, we are making a dent in the education space!

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