Problem statement (in detail)
Open Educational Resources (OER) have a huge potential to systemically improve access and quality of education and innovate the sector. Nevertheless OER’s struggle with the scarce time of teachers, no remuneration for content creators, and close to no incentives for the educational community to test or evaluate the resources. Therefore, even though there is this huge potential of OER’s, with the lack of scientific and pedagogical proof and proper incentivization for their creation and testing they will not succeed.
In the production process of OER’s public and private donor organizations are highly important for funding and quality assessment (UNESCO 2019). Even though many international donors spend money on education and the creation of OER’s, due to the lack of a systemic approach and a proper funding mechanism there is still relatively little impact on the international education system.
<u>Problem spheres</u>
- Funding for OER’s depends on public and private donors
- There are no appropriate reward structures for creating OER’S yet
- Funding in OER’s is not yet sustainable in the long-term
- Rewards to produce or test OER’s are not ensured for creators and teachers
- Donor organizations invested in the OER movement can’t rely on the diligence of content creators and evaluators
- For donor organizations monitoring and evaluation of OER production and their impact on education is hard to track
Solution to the problem (in detail)
“Ensure that the cycle of OER production and reuse is sustainable over time for those actors involved in their production and reuse” (UNESCO 2019).
To make sure that the OER production process is sustainable and incentivizing dTeach’s creators pool, we want to build a decentralized cash-flow for the OER production by setting up a stable donor pool forming a marketplace responding to the offer and demand of OER’s.
We provide donors with the following monitoring & evaluation structures to enable diligent but unbureaucratic funding for systemic impact on education:
- Proven track record and expertise of project content creators and evaluators
- Transparent funding record of content creators
- Scalable and adaptable OER projects with cascading effects
- Personal relation between donors and funded topics, projects and creators
- Transparent project monitoring and evaluation schemes (budget, process, results, impact)
- Proved impact on education by ensured quality, testing and evaluation through a decentralized and independent production and reviewing process
<u>Target group</u>
- Creators of public tenders (government / international organizations)
- Civil-society organizations, foundations and NGOs
- Private-sector firms (Corporate Social Responsibility)
- Educational, scientific and cultural organizations
The dTeach donor pool will guide international donor organizations to use ADA, the decicion making model of Cardano Catalyst and blockchain in general for their project funding, monitoring and evaluation. dTeach builds an impact oriented use case lobbying for the use of Cardano as a fundamental tool for future philanthrophy and development cooperation.
Unfortunately in F8 there is no campaign directed to education or the integration of traditional donor organizations into the blockchain space and Cardano. As neither of the campaign categories match to this proposal we are delighted that we found a place in the 'Miscallaneous Challenge'. We would be very pleased to see a Campaign on education in the next funding rounds.
<u>Alignment with Challenge KPIs</u>
- Establish Cardano as the preferred blockchain for development service, international tenders, philanthropy and education
- Establish ADA as the preferred currency for sustainable development and philanthropic projects and funding
- Connect Cardano with international donor organizations and the production of high quality and tested OER's
<u>Communication & marketing objectives</u>
- Establish ADA as the currency and state of the art for the production of OER's
- Make Cardano/ADA the first positive association for teachers and students with the world of crypto and blockchain
- Raise awareness that OER's and blockchain are important pillars for a systemic change in education
There are quiet a few challenges in building a donor pool to create a sustainable funding for the production of OER's using a blockchain based incentives structure:
- Traditional donor organizations (of any type) are just starting to get involved in blockchain and crypto
- Even though pioneering is ongoing, there is still an inhibition threshold to fund blockchain-based projects
- The ‘OER movement’ and the production of OERs has a lot of important international patrons (e.g. UNESCO and OECD) but lacks stable and sustainable funding
- Systemic change needs long-term and cross-sector collaboration and investments
<u>Mitigation strategy</u>
The above-mentioned challenges lie in the decentral nature of the project and the key to deal with them is the professional and profound persuasion that decentralization really is the innovation of eduaction and OERs.
- To cope with fear and loathing of crypto and blockchain in traditional donor organizations we will set up a professional pitch deck and provide basic but detailed information on how blockchain-technology can help revolutionize tender mechanisms and funding structures for donor organizations.
- Attract and win over early bird donor organizations that are keen on innovating or at least changing the field they are working in (especially education of course).These ‘change makers’ will create momentum to onboard more institutions.
- Blockchain-based decentralization and incentives for target groups in education will elevate the ‘OER movement’ to the next level. This will raise both, the meaning of / and the attention to OERs.