Name

Coursly.io - a decentralized marketplace for online courses.

Purpose

Share your knowledge with the entire world and get rewarded for it.

Problem #1: Knowledge Sharing is Exclusive

At it’s current state, sharing knowledge is exclusive to teachers who dictate content. The problem with this approach is that teachers are not always great at providing examples that stick. Ask yourself, how many times did you need help from another student or a tutor to understand a concept?

Solution: Utilize Decentralized Knowledge Sharing

Let teachers create great courses, but enable students to contribute knowledge. Coursly.io allows students to contribute concepts to help other students. Anyone can teach and anyone can learn. Teachers are students and students are teacher. Coursly.io rewards helpful shares with tokens that can be used to learn or to earn.

Problem #2: Learning is Not Incentivized

Why is it that students, the ones who are usually least financially equipped, have to burden most of the expense? No course platform in existence bothers addressing this issue. Course creators get rewarded while students keep emptying their pockets. We think this ought to change.

Solution: Incentivize Students by Enabling Crowd Voting

Steemit rewards content creators and curators. Coursly.io rewards teachers and students equally. Whether you have the muster to create a new course, or to contribute to an existing one, both teachers and students are rewarded equally through crowd voting. Find a concept example useful? Vote it up and the student suggesting it gets rewarded. It’s a win-win for creators and contributors. Not to mention, great contributions make for even greater courses.

Problem #3: Great Courses Have a High Entry Barrier

Want to take up a new profession but can’t swing $1,200 for a quality course? Too bad. With the current ecosystem ambitious students in less fortunate places face astronomical fees if they wish to better themselves. We think all knowledge should be easily accessible to everyone, no matter your financial standing.

Solution: Low Entry Fee to Enable Learning for Masses

Coursly.io seeks to educate the entire world while at the same time empowering teachers. Lower entry fees via tokens allow the less fortunate to advance themselves no matter their current situation. Teachers are rewarded with greater global audiences powered by token micro-payments. Why teach 1000 when you can teach a million? Want to share your knowledge for free while collecting voluntary contributions? You got it.

Huge Opportunity for Students to Earn While Learning

Instead of facing student debt and high course fee burdens, Coursly.io students can earn while they learn. By contributing examples to help understand concepts, students can earn tokens to support their studies. Think of it as Reddit for learning, but instead of useless karma you can support yourself and others around you.

Description

What makes Coursly.io unique is the distributed peer voting system that takes student's collective understanding into accounting. When students share learning mechanisms and examples with other students they are able to be tipped with coins. In essence, students who get a better grasp on complex topics can earn greater rewards. This loop ecosystem improves existing courses through multiple points of contact.

Teachers earn coins by creating great courses on variety of subjects. One peak at Udemy or any other popular course platform and you'll see the vast space of online courses and their growing potential.

Students get access to affordable courses that were otherwise closed to them via high fees. Students are able to earn coin through contributions and spend it as they please - cashing out or simply picking up another online course.

Distributed online course platforms open up a vast opportunity for a number of groups:

The Unbanked. Somewhere near 2 billion people in the world are currently unbanked. A vast majority of these people are unable to access online courses, yet alone be able to afford them even if they did have a method to make a payment. The distributed nature of the platform would open up the knowledge sharing to the entire world - enabling teachers to serve a greater population while accepting more reasonable fees from a greater number of people. This in turn allows students taking their courses to contribute and elevate their course popularity further. The chain effect is a win-win for everyone.

Thanks!

If you like my idea, please vote for it or leave comments about why you think this would not work.

My ether address, should this idea interest you guys: 0xa94CFC47c03E445eA0000C2656FC7d10f7aE95cd

Lots of questions...

Can you define "learning mechanism"?

So kinda like an educational steemit?

Who will make the coins?

Who will vet new courses to make sure they aren't stolen?

Who keeps the courses up to date?

Your target market is people is the unbanked? They get the latest courses photocopied at the local copy centre for 50c.

How will the unbanked pay for the courses? in crypto? How will they get it?

In what languages will they access the data?

What is the market size you're targeting in $USD?

Don't focus on this phrase, just something I came up with at the moment. The concept is to allow student contributions to online courses so it's so of a participative environment instead of a 1-to-all downstream push of knowledge.
Kind of yes. More like online courses with steemit functions.
The platform will create all of the coins.
Nobody vets anything. Courses are created mostly through video and you'll know exactly if someone stole a course - because it wont be them talking. If the course is supplemented with other materials we treat them the same as everything else on the internet - copyright.
Creators create and keep their own courses up to date. See Udemy, Teachable and hundreds of other platforms that already operate this way on fiat.
Target market is the vast population that seeks alternative education. Unbanked is just an example, no need to focus on this. Videos can't be photocopied. It is well known that the current educational system in place does a poor job at keeping up with changing pace of just about everything in the world. Universities cram a bunch of unnecessary information and cost a pretty penny. Online courses are a mere fraction of the cost and get you employable skills much faster.
Crypto enabled the unbanked to use coins and tokens to interact with decentralized markets. It is the premise behind omisego and other startups. If you are not certain how these people buy into the system then I recommend doing that research for yourself. Look up Africa Cell Phone Use, you'll get the idea.
Any language. That's the beauty of such a decentralized platform is that anyone can create courses and students or just about anyone can even help translate them with permission of the owner. In fact, there could be a smart contract in place to give a portion of the course earnings to whoever translates it to their native language - heck even multiple people can pursue this task and the best translation gets voted into existence.
According to Forbes the online learning industry made up $107B worldwide in 2015. With ever-growing rate of the gig economy and culture we are certain to see this market boom well beyond $107B.

Thanks for your replies. I wasn't thinking about video courses, but yes that would make a lot of sense! Storage via IPFS or filecoin I imagine.

OK you've convinced me that it could work...

On 21 August 2017 at 16:56, Gene Maryushenko notifications@github.com wrote:

1.

Don't focus on this phrase, just something I came up with at the moment. The concept is to allow student contributions to online courses so it's so of a participative environment instead of a 1-to-all downstream push of knowledge. 2.

Kind of yes. More like online courses with steemit functions. 3.

The platform will create all of the coins. 4.

Nobody vets anything. Courses are created mostly through video and you'll know exactly if someone stole a course - because it wont be them talking. If the course is supplemented with other materials we treat them the same as everything else on the internet - copyright. 5.

Creators create and keep their own courses up to date. See Udemy, Teachable and hundreds of other platforms that already operate this way on fiat. 6.

Target market is the vast population that seeks alternative education. Unbanked is just an example, no need to focus on this. Videos can't be photocopied. It is well known that the current educational system in place does a poor job at keeping up with changing pace of just about everything in the world. Universities cram a bunch of unnecessary information and cost a pretty penny. Online courses are a mere fraction of the cost and get you employable skills much faster. 7.

Crypto enabled the unbanked to use coins and tokens to interact with decentralized markets. It is the premise behind omisego and other startups. If you are not certain how these people buy into the system then I recommend doing that research for yourself. Look up Africa Cell Phone Use, you'll get the idea. 8.

Any language. That's the beauty of such a decentralized platform is that anyone can create courses and students or just about anyone can even help translate them with permission of the owner. In fact, there could be a smart contract in place to give a portion of the course earnings to whoever translates it to their native language - heck even multiple people can pursue this task and the best translation gets voted into existence. 9.

According to Forbes the online learning industry made up $107B worldwide in 2015. With ever-growing rate of the gig economy and culture we are certain to see this market boom well beyond $107B.

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Hey @cogentgene

I'm not sure if you're aware but we recently launched a new bounty to migrate your proposals to the actual District Registry: https://registry.district0x.io/

We're replacing the old voting app with the registry. Let me know if you need help but I would love to see you migrate this over so you can claim your DNT.

It does take a 10,000 DNT submit to submit your proposal but this gives you an extra 2000 you can stake in the registry beyond the deposit amount.

Hit me up on Telegram or Discord if you need help or have questions.

Telegram: https://t.me/district0x/75217 Discord: https://discord.gg/P9RQejv

PS, please excuse the canned response. I am encouraging everyone here to start migrating so they can claim their 12000 DNT.

district0x / district-proposals

DP #104 - Coursly.io - Online Courses Powered by Blockchain #104