Please describe your proposed solution.
We perceive the limited number of free educational platforms and content relating to the Cardano blockchain platform as a barrier to the ecosystem's growth. Our proposed solution is an opportunity to serve Catalyst, the Cardano community and future developers. Over two years of producing the “Descentralización Total Cardano Podcast,” a Spanish language podcast that includes weekly live Q&As related to everything Cardano and interviews with more than 50 Cardano ecosystem projects, we have seen the need for developers and the community to engage in education through new and different sources.
In addition to the podcast, we have 2 years of experience operating a stake pool which has allowed us to be in contact with another demographic of the Spanish speaking community of Cardano. Many of our team members were guests on our podcast and have their own projects and interests in Cardano. From this mutual interest and passion in the Cardano blockchain platform, our project was born. Our podcast currently has 11.7k subscribers and an average reach of 1.1k per video. Between our podcast and stake pool operation, we have more than 1000 meaningful interactions monthly through engagement on social media platforms such as Youtube, Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, Discord, and Whatsapp. This makes us uniquely positioned to start our project with a strong convocation, providing educational content and reaching potential users, both in the Spanish speaking community and beyond.
We aim to engage Cardano community members who want to learn to be developers, groups of female coding boot camps as well as developers interested in learning about e-utxo. We intend to serve the Catalyst community by providing educational content and increasing the number of developers in the Cardano ecosystem.
Our proposed solution, an e-learning platform, will be implemented by a team of academic professionals who will research and create content as well as develop tools for evaluating the user's learning experience and measuring achievement on the platform. Our e-learning platform will provide high quality educational content organized into a written and audiovisual format and including a quiz test at the end of each course so the student can achieve measurable goals and demonstrate their learning through a score system. The result of this platform will be an increase in the amount of Cardano developers able to work on Catalyst and in the Cardano ecosystem and an enrichment and diversification of the ecosystem.
Latin America is currently the global region showing the 2nd strongest growth of its developer population, with a growth rate faster than North America and just behind the Asia Pacific region (source: Evans Data). This indicates there may be strong demand for instructional content for Spanish speaking developers. However, although we are a majority Spanish speaking team based in Latin America, we plan to create our content in both Spanish and English, as English is the most widely spoken language globally and we hope to be able to reach a wide audience. We intend to create enough content anyone can have the tools and knowledge at their fingertips to learn functional programming, Haskell, Plutus, Plutarch or Marlowe and everything in between.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
The creation of an e-learning platform for Cardano developers will increase the number of developers in the Cardanno ecosystem able to create quality dApps, products and integrations which will ultimately lead to increasing the utility and adoption of Cardano.
In order to have an ecosystem of different dApps, products and integrations for the community to use we need to address the need for learning resources that allows developers to gain an in-depth understanding of all the benefits that Cardano’s Extended UTXO model offers.
With the goal of increasing products and solutions useful to the Cardano community we plan to create an instructional e-learning platform that covers topics related to Cardano and blockchain in a way that is comprehensive and step-by-step, starting with the basics and working up to the challenges of building on blockchain.
Topic categories we plan to cover:
Why create a new platform instead of using the existing educational resources available?
After a research process that included quoting a sample of online learning services we came across 3 reason why utilzing an existing learning platform is not the best option for this challenge:
In summary, many courses and learning resources currently available are not accessible to a large portion of aspiring developers due to the cost. Free resources available are often incomplete, don’t cover all the topics required to be able to create dApps and integrations in the Cardano ecosystem, or weren’t created for Spanish speaking developers or new developers in mind, using proven pedagogical methodologies and developed by academic professionals in the industry. Additionally, we have not found an easily customizable or updateable open-source learning platform that offers such a wide scope of topics with the in-depth instruction we have in mind.
We plan to make accessible content broken down into digestible lessons which make use of different formats (written, audiovisual) and include at the end of each lesson a quiz to measure learning achievements. We will also include access to docker containers so users can test what they have learned in the lesson.
Although this project is targeted towards developers, as the Cardano ecosystem continues to grow the interest for an educational platform that allows any community member access to the knowledge and topics we cover continues to grow.
The development of our product will be divided into stages where in each iteration we improve the user and learning experience based on the feedback received from the community.
We also see an opportunity in the industry to increase gender equality and empowerment of women through ICT, which is why we plan to partner with female coding boot camps and invite these groups to collaborate, learn and build with us in the Cardano ecosystem.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
High Costs :
To produce the level of quality content required for the project to launch successfully and be accessible to a diverse scope of users will require significant funds, specifically:
- Research and Content Creators
In order to create the content and e-learning platform we envision, it is necessary to have a team of dedicated, qualified, and trained professionals collaborating on the project. If we are unable to obtain funds required to compensate our team at the industry standard rate for their work and preparation (certifications, access to resources) for the project, this could potentially delay the project timeline.
- Production of Audiovisual Content
We find high quality audiovisual content related to the Cardano blockchain platform to be lacking. To remove as many barriers to learning as possible for a diverse group of users, we want to incorporate this type of content onto our e-learning platform. To achieve this we are choosing to work with an experienced video production company, however the cost of high quality audiovisual production is high.
- User Support
Ensuring the success of our e-learning platform will require implementing a user support service where users’ questions and doubts can be answered as they face the challenges of functional programming with Haskell (Plutus, Plutarch, Marlowe ) and understanding e-utxo. This will require contracting a trained support person with credentials in Cardano as a service.
- Incentives for Trial Period Users
To incentivize a diverse group to use our platform and complete the course during the a trial period we would like to offer financial incentives in the form of ADA or stablecoin in exchange for completion of the course and providing user feedback.
In summary, we foresee insufficient funds or a delay in funding for the aforementioned costs as a potential risk for the success of the project.