Please describe your proposed solution.
Problems/Current Status:
With close access to online/offline communities, universities we are seeing:
- IT students are the core force in developing Blockchain applications in the near future, however, there are currently no official, open educational resources (OER), standardized teaching materials on Blockchain in the University.
- Curriculum writing and approval are subject to the University's approval processes. It often takes time in some universities.
- With ~55K IT students graduating yearly, The expected shortage of human resources in IT- in Vietnam (need 530k- view data here), but students are equipped with limited blockchain knowledge, not meeting the human resource needs of Vietnam and the world.
- Becoming a programmer on the Cardano blockchain platform can be a barrier for many developers because Cardano utilizes Haskell/Plutus, which are less common programming languages, and the community of participants is relatively limited compared to other languages. New languages like Aiken, Plu-ts, and Opshin have recently been released, so it takes time and guidance for the community to become familiar with them. Other foundation blockchain documents are scattered in many places in the English language.
- There are other blockchain platforms such as NEAR, SOLANA, COSMOS that are investing in free programming teaching on their platforms to attract developers, but there is no mainstream courseware in Uni yet.
With the predicted shortage of human resources in the field of Information Technology in general, and specifically in blockchain, as well as the barriers to becoming a Cardano blockchain developer, we believe that a fresh approach is needed to attract developers from outside the Cardano ecosystem.
Problem-solving:
Project participants include a team of lecturers with many years of experience in teaching and writing specialized IT textbooks. Understand the process of creating and publishing textbooks in Universities to realize the publication of Blockchain textbooks and put them into practice.
The project team will collect open source courseware, standardize the curriculum and assign Trainers to attend training courses directly from Emurgo, Cardano Foundation. These participants will be key members in composing/translating courseware.
We will bring these textbooks into the teaching of students/developers, collect the feedback throughout the survey and improve the curriculum. On each chapter of the curriculum, the names of the authors, editors, and acknowledgments that this is the achievement of a project funded by Project Catalyst will be documented. This courseware will be published under open educational resources (OER) license.
Integrating the two courses (Fundamental Blockchain and Cardano Blockchain for Developers) into the curriculum will provide students with a close and friendly learning experience. They will receive guidance and support directly in the classroom where they have previously studied, attracting young and potential developers to the Cardano ecosystem.
Being designed as official courses, students who are interested, especially promising developers, will be motivated to engage with the materials and source code despite the difficulties. Once students become familiar with the Cardano ecosystem, they will bring their creative ideas and products to this platform.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
With the foresee challenges and solutions, we believe that the project will be completely suitable for the challenge because:
- Many students at the University have a desire to become proficient in programming on a blockchain platform. As the University does not currently offer a dedicated course, they often engage in free courses on platforms like NEAR, SOLANA, and BSC. This requires students to invest additional time and effort into learning without receiving recognition in their university profiles. The two courses (Fundamental Blockchain and Cardano Blockchain for Developers) will become official courses at the University. This will facilitate and encourage students' exploration and research. We believe this will be an excellent experience for students (promising developers), incentivizing them and leading to increased adoption, productivity, and creativity.
- Teaching these two courses at two universities and making them available as open educational resources (OER) for other institutions to reference, along with the Train the Trainer model, we anticipate a large number of students in the first cohort and subsequent cohorts will be attracted to join the Cardano ecosystem.
- Designed as official courses, the curriculum will encompass both theoretical knowledge, practical exercises, and completion of assignments. This serves as both motivation and a challenge for developers at the university, keeping them motivated to persevere through the documentation and code, regardless of the difficulty.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
To measure the success of the project, these indicators can be considered:
- Adoption and integration: The success can be measured by the number of universities that adopt the blockchain textbooks and integrate the courses into their curriculum.
- Student enrollment: The success can also be assessed by the number of students enrolling in the blockchain courses.
- Feedback and improvement: The project team can gather feedback from experts, lecturers, students and other stakeholders involved in the implementation of the courses.
- Course materials: The teaching duration, video hours, number of course materials, and quiz/test will also be used by us to measure the success of the project.
- Developer participation: The success of attracting developers to the Cardano ecosystem can be measured by monitoring the number of developers who actively engage with the Cardano platform after completing the courses.
- Recognition and acknowledgment: The acknowledgment of the project's achievement, This recognition demonstrates the impact and credibility of the project within the academic and blockchain communities.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
To share the outputs and results of our project, we have the following plans:
- Project Reports (PoM and PoA):
We will submit a Statement of Milestones (SoM) which will be published, reviewed and approved by Community Reviewers. In each Milestone, we will public Proof of Achievement (PoA) to provide evidence that the milestone for which we have already been paid has been achieved.
- Release outputs/results on our website
We will outputs/results on our website at UBA, VOER, C2VN where interested individuals can access our update proactively. Discuss or query us any topics they prefer.
- Share outputs/results to social platforms (Cardano Forum, Facebook, telegram, twitter, youtube and github):
These will be places we share updates, success stories, and best practices. These will allow us to reach a larger audience and gather feedback and suggestions from the community, fostering a collaborative approach to decentralized identity adoption