WhitePaper - nopara73/MoneyForStudy GitHub Wiki

#MoneyForStudy A User Powered Educational Platform

Author: nopara73
Email: [email protected]

ABSTRACT. An educational platform where users either have to pay or contribute to access new materials enables participation to everyone, regardless of financial background.
When a user choose to pay for a material that is created by an other user, the creator gets payed. As a consequence not only beginners, but experts are incentivized to join the platform and create more material in the hope of financial compensation.
Users are not directly paying for specific materials, but rather for a group of materials those are presenting the same topic. The user then can choose which material it liked the most, so which creator should get its money. This competition guarantees an always growing quality of materials.
In contrast to other educational solutions, MoneyForStudy is based on content creation by its users, here students are not isolated islands.

##Introduction

When someone decides to learn a new skill, like a new programming language, she/he will encounter some obstacles.

The method it chooses:

  1. might be expensive,
  2. not likely to provide any experience,
  3. might not be effective,
  4. is likely not engaging enough.

A user powered educational platform with the pay or contribute incentive structure solves the first two problem, applying the relevant psychology behind the learning and video game addiction solves the remaining ones:

  1. With the pay or contribute incentive structure participation will be just as expensive as the user can afford it to be. Better, the user can profit right away by teaching others.
  2. By contributing the user gains experience. As it progresses further it will be able to act more freely. At later stages it would be even possible to incentivize them to contribute to real projects, to team up, start new projects, hiring lower level users for easy, robotic tasks or higher level users for more difficult tasks, start making money with the new skills they are learning and get rewarded in the platform for it.
  3. The platform also incorporates the teaching of various techniques those teach the users how to learn and think, like S.M.A.R.T. goals, oblique strategies, SQ3R, mindmaps and so on.
  4. The psychology behind addiction, especially the techniques video games are using to engage their players is a powerful toolbox for keeping motivation up.

The question of exactly what learning and motivational strategies to introduce is an open question and requires more study on the subjects. They can be incrementally implemented after the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is delivered.

##Background

Dreyfus model of skill acquisition

According to the Dreyfus brothers a novice learns and behaves differently from an expert. (Surprise!) They identify five stages of skill acquisition: Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient and Expert.
Novices need recipes, experts work from intuition. Novices do not consider the context, experts do. And everything in between.
While there are a lot to talk about this, the takeaway is: depending on what level you are you need different ways to study. These stages are mirrored in MoneyForStudy. In the MVP we aim to implement only the Novice stage. Scaling to higher stages can be achieved later.

###Multisensory input

We do know if a material is presented to us in different ways not only our understanding on it will be better, but also it will retain better. Users are expected to come up more novel and unique ways to present a topic to their peers in order to stand out and win the competition. This is how the multisensory experience materializes itself in MoneyForStudy.

###Learn by synthesis as well as by analysis

|Excerpt from Andy Hunt's Pragmatic Thinking and Learning|

|And you might already be reaching for synthetic learning more often than you think. When faced with a difficult design problem, or an elusive bug, good programmers generally have an urge to reach for code and build something that they can learn from. That’s R-mode synthesis, as opposed to the L-mode analysis. That’s why we like prototypes and independent unit tests. These give us the opportunity to learn by synthesis—by building.| |In fact, synthesis is such a powerful learning technique that Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab suggested in Don’t Dissect the Frog, Build It [Neg94] that to really learn about a frog, traditional dissection is not the way to go. The better way to learn about a frog is to build one.| |That is, task the students with building a being that has froglike characteristics. It’s a great way to really learn what makes a frog a frog and how frogs are adapted to their particular environment. It’s a perfect example of learning by synthesis.|

Gaining experience is learning by synthesis. MoneyForStudy encourages students to gain experience, on lower Dreyfus stages by teaching and interacting with peers, on higher ones by encouraging participation in real world projects. Knowing how it will be achieved on higher stages is not essential for the MVP.

###Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a digital currency and a payment network that is expected to revolutionize the world economy. It is the currency of the Internet and the most advanced and global form of money we know today, accessible for anyone in the world.
In contrast, using traditional payment systems would automatically lock out the vast majority of human population from participation. The regulations they have to impose on their customers would invite legal and technical problems and the MoneyForStudy platform would inevitably be stifled into regulatory lethargy, just like many others in the sharing economy. The development of our platform should not suffer from bureaucratic overhead. (Looking at you Uber!)

##Path to customers

###Topics The platform would consists of topics. Every topic has one or multiple gurus those put novices on their path to expertise by creating the first lessons, setting up the topics for the way forward. As students progress, the complexity of the game grows and the ways of contribution are extending. Simultaneously the roles of the gurus are weakening.

###Early adopters The MVP will kick off with one topic at the Novice Dreyfus level.
I discovered the demand for wanting to learn programming in the Bitcoin community. This is not surprising considering nature of Bitcoin as programmable money and the amount of respect people have towards developers there.
I am co-authoring the Bitcoin C# book so StudyForMoney is in a great position to open with the first topic of a Bitcoin themed programming tutorial.

##Conclusion MoneyForStudy can take a novice to the level of an expert and get their career kicked off with the connections and experience they will have to build during the course.