Educator's Guide to Web3: Decentralizing School and University
Part II of III - What might education in a Web3 world actually look like?
In the first part of this series, we did some ‘pre-training’ on the terminology of Web3 so that those who are especially new to the space can make sense of the alphabet soup. Remember to check out our Web3 and Education Readocracy Reading List.
In this part, we’ll actually explore how these ideas might dovetail with the education world.
Centralization in Education
As we’ve seen, at its core, Web3 is about distributed ‘ownership’ and ‘decentralization’. If the original sin of Web2 is that intermediaries, central authorities and platforms are reaping outsized benefits, Web3, in its most idealistic form, hopes to empower individuals.
So where is there centralized authority in education? Turns out, lots of places!
Teachers and professors are central authorities in a classroom who decide what is taught, assign and grade homework, ‘censor’ certain ideas, students, or language, and provide feedback and grades.
School administrators and deans are central authorities, approve curricula, make hiring decisions, maintain budgets, and create school policies.
K-12 schools are centralized entities that hire, fire, decide on local policies, manage students, run events, maintain budgets and more. In K-12, school principals or headmasters run the show and are empowered to make unilateral decisions
Colleges and universities are central authorities- decide which students to admit, make hiring and firing decisions, they patent and profit off of research, determine salaries and create school policy, including how each department is funded (or not) and how to spend their often sizable endowments.
But that’s not all! If you zoom out a bit further, there is a whole other layer of ‘centralized’ institutions that determines how education works:
In the US, school boards are central authorities with enormous power over curricula, funding decisions and policy, while the federal Department of Education “establishes policy for, administers and coordinates most federal assistance to education.”
In many countries around the world, Ministries of Education are central authorities that write or approve curricula and school policy for the entire country or for regions of the country.
Accrediting bodies are central authorities that determine the standards by which colleges and universities receive their right to teach.
Companies are central authorities for working learners that decide how to provide learning and development, corporate training, education benefits and tuition reimbursement.
Edtech platforms are the very definition of Web2 centralization; Edx and Coursera decide which universities or companies can publish courses within its ecosystem. Udemy decides which courses to promote on its home page and which to censor or remove. Teachers Pay Teachers, despite being an amazing platform for educators, still takes a cut from teachers’ sale of their material.
If looking at this list makes education sound like an Orwellian maze of power-mad bureaucracies out of Brazil… well, looked at through a Web3 lens, it kind of is.
Let’s look at an example:
Example of Centralization in Education: Computer Science
Consider Computer Science (CS), an educational field that has been in increasingly high demand for university students for fifteen years, as well as a national imperative. Yet, students have trouble getting seats in class.
”The number of undergraduates majoring in [Computer Science] more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, to over 106,000, while tenure-track faculty ranks rose about 17 percent, according to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers data from about 200 universities.” - NYTimes
The number of undergraduate majors doubled, but the number of tenure-track faculty rose by 17%. The demand doubled, but the supply went up by >20%. Why the discrepancy?
Anyone with a Higher Education background will have noticed that the term ‘tenure-track’ is key here: to address growing demand in the field, universities have often opted to hire adjuncts, at the lower rungs of power and at lower cost to the university. They may have also increased class sizes.
But there’s a more important reason: the ability to expand, update or modernize the education ecosystem means getting signoff through the entire centralized hierarchy- University Presidents, provosts, deans, and faculty all have to agree - which means expanding or reallocating budgets, buying supplies, approving hires, changing curriculum, ensuring continued accreditation, passing faculty committees, and more.
In K-12 schooling, the lift to introduce new subjects like Computer Science is even higher. Check out this fascinating graphic from a 2020 Brookings report about the availability of CS education worldwide: Asia (Japan, China, South Korea, Malaysia), Europe (UK, Ireland and several countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, notably Russia), Australia, New Zealand, Morocco and Ghana, all make computer science mandatory, while most of the US, India, and France leave it up to individual schools.
Besides the resistance to change built into our current education system, there is a significant human cost. In the complex hierarchy of universities, some stakeholders, such as university presidents, provosts, trustees, deans, select alumni, department heads, and tenured faculty, can wield enormous power, while others, including grad or undergrad students, adjuncts, lower-level administrators, staff, parents, have little say.
At the K12 level, classroom teachers serve a difficult middle management role- they are the first line of defense against angry parents or misbehaving children, but are subject to many layers of management that determine what they can teach, from teacher leads to principals to school boards to district heads to testing companies.
The reality is that for too many those outside of the central institutions— the student whose intro to computer science class is already filled when they arrive on campus, the teacher subject to constantly changing district policies, the underpaid humanities adjunct lecturer at constant risk of being let go or accused by students, or the online content creator whose video courses keep getting rejected— being overrun by centralized authorities and intermediaries is too often their lived experience.
What might Web 3 education look like?
Let’s walk through a hypothetical day in a future Web3 ecosystem with Victory, a fictional sixteen year old student inspired by real life wunderkind Victory Yinka-Banjo.
Decentralized Admissions
Victory is interested in learning computer science, so she applies to a computer science focused educational DAO called “CSFuturists”. All the criteria used to decide if she gets in or not are transparently documented for her to see, and determined by a central governing committee that consists of the entire school ecosystem, including current students and alumni.
The admissions process works through a dApp (a distributed app that allows users to interact with a blockchain), and it evaluates and processes Victory’s application immediately; Victory is able to get a decision about whether or not she was admitted within days, not months.
In fact, many institutions have chosen to remove application processes altogether, making their education DAOs fully open access; if you purchase tokens, you are immediately a member of the educational DAO, but tokens are provided based on each learners’ behavior, contributions and progress.
Decentralized Educational Organizations
Victory is accepted by the CSFuturists DAO! This means that she can purchase CSFuturist tokens, called CSF, or $CSF. The price of each individual token is fluid and changeable, but the cost of program admissions is maintained by the DAO itself. CSF tokens are all tracked through a distributed ledger (aka a blockchain) that records all transactions.
CSFuturists has a decentralized governance structure. As a token holder, Victory has a proportional vote on all matters related to the DAO’s governance and management: what programs will be offered, what the curriculum will include, which faculty is hired and how much they are paid, how money is used to invest in a physical campus (if at all), and how much administrators are paid (if at all).
Victory likes that there can never be a ‘majority’ stakeholder in CSFuturists- a 3% ownership is the maximum, as dictated by the smart contracts that govern the system, so Victory knows that her tokens and votes will always matter just as much as everyone else’s.
Victory is particularly interested in learning the Python programming language, so when a poll comes up on the Snapshot platform, she uses her tokens to vote for Python founder Guido Van Rossum as a teacher for the next semester.
Victory can also choose to ‘stake’ (lend) her tokens to particular projects within the DAO in exchange for additional voting rights and privileges, or to sell her tokens to others, perhaps even at a profit. Now that she’s in, Victory is literally invested in the success of the DAO.
Digital Incentives for Learners
But that’s not all- based on the type of education Victory chooses to pursue, there are parts of it that she can get paid for. Governments and corporations that are interested in developing particular in-demand skills might choose to engage in “Learn 2 Earn” models.
For example, non-profit Code.org might choose to incentivize Victory’s interest in Python-based computer science by offering their own tokens ($CDRZ) for kids who are learning to code. Governments can offer their own tokens because they have a shortage in the labor market with this skill set. Not to be outdone, companies like Netflix and Pixar, which also use Python, are offering their own tokens ($NTFX) and ($PXR) to students who apply their Python skills to computer graphics. Victory can use these tokens for various benefits; to get interviews at top companies, to buy into advanced learning programs, or for necessary supplies, like a new laptop.
In fact, dozens more “Learn to Earn” partnerships between skills hierarchies like EMSI Burning Glass, federal and local governments, hiring companies and educational institutions, are in line to be approved (by consensus) by the CSFuturists DAO.
Decentralized Educational Credentials
As Victory learns, she is also issued blockchain-based skills-based credentials at the end of each learning module, some in the form of NFTs. These credentials can then be bundled to create personalized pathways. Notably, Victory is not bound to an institution based on the program or degree she selected; she is able to take her acquired skills and transfer them anywhere else using a blockchain protocol that accepts and communicates these credentials. For example, the adjacent “Scientific Python” DAO has agreed (by vote, of course) to accept CSFuturist NFTs as evidence of advanced placement.
At CSFuturists, there is no issuing of degrees; instead, there is a virtual transcript in Victory’s digital wallet of all of the skills Victory has acquired through her education, work, and extracurricular activities. In fact, Victory does not ‘graduate’ (although she does hit key milestones on her journey); instead, she has life-long access to the CSFuturist DAO for as long as she still holds her $CSF tokens. Victory plans on holding her tokens until a newer DAO catches her interest, but she’s not taking anyone else’s spot- there are new $CSF tokens minted each year so that additional learners can join the DAO.
The Educational Metaverse
Many of Victory’s education experiences take place in the Metaverse, an immersive internet with embodied avatars. Because she holds $CSF tokens, she has access to collaborative learning projects with other CSFuturist members, in which she is building code immersively using virtual tools. Victory is able to pull open source code from anywhere else in the Metaverse with a gesture so she can work on it, and literally walk through her own codebase, adjusting and fixing bugs by hand.
Ownership of Curricula and Teaching Materials
As Victory progresses, she also decides to pay it forward and tutor a class of high school students; she builds an awesome curriculum for them. Just like Victory’s own teachers and mentors have fully ‘owned’ their own curricula, Victory owns her own curriculum as well, and with any use of it (by her or any other tutor or teacher), Victory earns royalties in TutorCoin ($TTC), which she can exchange for other currencies or use towards additional teaching experiences, like access to additional learning materials .
Avatars and Tokens and DAOs, oh my!
This decentralized vision of the future may excite, scare, or confuse you (or all three). There was hardly any mention of schools, universities, principals, bootcamps, school boards, or many other fixtures of our current system. In this particular vision, the learner was firmly in control of her own educational destiny, for better or worse.
But whether we’re ready or not, many aspects of this new education reality are already in existence; digital incentives for learning, decentralized education institutions, and skills-based blockchain-enabled digital credentials are already becoming a reality.
In the next (and final, we promise) section of this series, we’ll look at each of these ideas, what they might mean and who’s already pursuing them.
Educator's Guide to Web3: Decentralizing School and University
*"Edtech platforms are the very definition of Web2 centralization; Edx and Coursera decide which universities or companies can publish courses within its ecosystem. Udemy decides which courses to promote on its home page and which to censor or remove. Teachers Pay Teachers, despite being an amazing platform for educators, still takes a cut from teachers’ sale of their material."*
I think edtech platforms are the best bridge to distributed learning. Online education platforms are the best thing to democratize learning, people from undeveloped nations taking Harvard courses online is great. The idea that centralized education = bad is not really valid.
Your argument lacks an understanding of how businesses are built, people build solutions to problems and have to be rewarded in some way (usually monetarily).