Please describe your proposed solution.

We propose to enhance the Plutus Pioneer Program, a flagship educational initiative by Cardano. The Plutus Pioneer Program has proven to be a resounding success, attracting developers from around the world who are eager to learn and contribute to Cardano's ecosystem. However, as the program expands, it faces challenges in terms of scalability, community interaction, and ongoing support for participants and suffers from a centralized structure that hinders its continued development.

Centralization leads to the stagnation in the quality assurance of any product or institution. This issues plagues not only social media companies, but especially traditional education (formats and programs). The Plutus Pioneer Program, even if openly accessible, has not been improved substantially through outside feedback. The learners and educators, as well as SME (subject matter experts) have no opportunity to provide constructive feedback in order to help improve the overall product. Arguably the openness facet (i.e. everything accessible through GitHub) by itself does not provide enough incentives for the community to take ownership of improving the education program.

Imagine an e-learning platform that is not controlled by any central authority—a platform where users have full ownership and control over their learning data. This is the vision we aim to realize by leveraging the power of Cardano's blockchain. Instead of reinventing the wheel with a new massive open-source software or learning management system, we propose to create small, independent parts that integrate with Cardano and empower users to connect learning materials from various sources in a decentralized manner.

Decentralized Connectivity:

Our platform recognizes that learning materials can exist anywhere, whether on platforms like YouTube or within the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). What sets us apart is the development of a new decentralized application (Dapp) that establishes connections and relationships between these materials. This ensures that learners can access a rich array of content while benefiting from the security and transparency provided by Cardano's blockchain.

Collaborative Creation and Feedback:

To facilitate a truly collaborative learning experience, we will provide educators and SMEs with POCRE; a tool that enables them to collaboratively create and organize learning materials in a coherent and engaging manner. POCRE will empower experts and teachers to leverage the collective expertise of their peers, fostering a dynamic environment for knowledge creation and curation. Furthermore, learners will have the opportunity to provide feedback at any stage of the learning process, ensuring continuous improvement and personalization.

Incentivizing Collaboration:

One of the key features of our platform is the ability to incentivize collaborative content creation. As students pay to receive tokens and certificates of accomplishment, the funds collected will be distributed among the content creators. This incentivization model encourages the development of high-quality, diverse learning materials and promotes a vibrant ecosystem where contributors are rewarded for their valuable contributions.

At eLearningDAO we are building a platform for the decentralization and creation of the eLearning materials together with the incentivization of the authoring process. Here the project's presentation https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VpFnPE5v1Vq1JI1vlzc7zmUabrIowFvc6mT1NaU2xlA/edit?usp=sharing and there are no license

How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

1 Co-Creation as a DEMOCRATIC VALUE for the ecosystem

By incorporating and incentivizing the community to engage in improving material, shared values can be developed. Co-creating educational material with the help of blockchain technology has potentially far reaching implications, especially to the Open Education community, through which Cardano can become a global market leader.

2 Achievement of DECENTRALISATION at any level

• learning material located on IPFS (not just youtube, github, etc)
• user learning data decentralised and collected in the user wallet
• release and certification of user knowledge no longer centralised

3 Achievement of REPUTATION of curricula

We can achieve the reputation of curricula based on effective user learning data using the whole history of transactions, instead of just relying on the brand/prestige of institutions (public or private) as today we are used to doing.

4 Achievement of EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

What if you want to learn "Advanced Management Program" from MIT, but you can't go there or pay $65000? You live in Africa and earn less money. You think you can't get your dream job. But what if someone shares all the materials online? You can study them and prove your skills to your boss. Maybe your online certificate is even better than the MIT one.

How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

The success of our project could be measured in various ways, technological (level of decentralization), engagement (members of the community involved in improving education processes) and eventually the pick-up of the Plutus pioneers program in terms of successful attendants, as well as methodological (via successful iterations of material through co-creation).

• Technological: How decentralized is the process? How decentralized is the storage of the educational materials?
• Engagement: How does the community react to the possible involvement? How many SMEs, how many Instructional Designers, how many learners engage with the improvement process?
• Pioneers: How does the reception and success-rate of the Plutus pioneers program change?
• Methodological: How does the quality of the educational processes change? How the quality of the material change?

Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

We will update the website and the GitHub project with information about the progress and the status of the development.

Every progress will be also posted on Twitter to let the community know in real-time.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Collectively our core team (Mario, Bence and Ben) we bring 35+ years of experience in the field of educational technology development, instructional design, teaching, pedagogy and education. Ranging from school, to university lecturing, research projects as well as software development.

What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

Our goals are twofold:

1. Democratize the educational process by incentivizing the community to partake in improving their processes (from SMEs, to Instructional Designers, to learners).
2. By focusing on the Cardano ecosystem (and Plutus Pioneers) first, we hope you bring not only awareness but participation from the community in improving the entire ecosystem (through incentives), therefore developing the quality of the Cardano ecosystem.

The validation of the project comes in two ways:

1. In addition we are researching and expanding the theoretical and practical field of educational Co-Creation (see our research proposal), through connecting this framework to issues plaguing Open Education communities for years.
2. By getting involved in the Plutus program, we hope to see active participation and openness from the Community. Validation comes in the form of community engagement, and in wanting to improve their educational processes, valuing the research behind it and deeply caring about decentralizing as many processes (as possible and necessary).

Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

ACTION PLAN

Milestone 1 (2 months):

• Wireframing all the use cases (for teacher/verifier and student) and workflows
• Build the design & user interface
• Using Github for progress tracking and twitter for marketing
• Identify and split all the plutus video content that needs to be refactored

Milestone 2 (2 months):

• Build a micro Content Management System designed for :

1. editing/publishing micro courses description
2. editing/publishing correlated links of learning material and assessment that represent the course
3. defining each learning material, assessment and knowledge verification
4. manage feedback from learners to content and verifier

• Identification of the different competencies to mix and match, with a related grade of verification, in order to release the certification/acknowledgement

Milestone 3 (2 months):

• Integrate a browser wallet like Nami for more expert users
• Create a learner profile area accessible via wallet, in order to interact with materials and give feedback
• Track in a dashboard the learner bookmark, progress and achievement
• Generate the certification (as a document in the wallet) with the list of all the learning materials exposed, who were the authors of the materials, when the exposition happened, when the verification passed, what grade was achieved, and who verified
• Test and bugfix
• Create a simple video explanation for marketing purposes

Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Milestone 1 :

• Wireframing workflows will be accessible on Figma
• Design & user interface will be accessible on Figma
• Github project will be fully set and updated for progress tracking with automatic tweets for every task planned and assigned
• All Plutus videos that need to be refactored, will be edited and stored on the cloud (in order to be later available for the platform).

Milestone 2 :

• Deployment of a micro Content Management System able to set micro courses description, with links on the learning material and assessments that represent the course refactored.
• The platform deployed (reachable via link) will be also able to collect user feedback and release certification of acknowledgement.

Milestone 3 (2 months):

• The platform will be accessible via Nami which will store the learning user profile, its dashboard of progresses, achievements and certifications.
• A video will be published to explain how the plutus pioneer can be improved by adopting this decentralised eLearning platform.

Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

BUDGET BREAKDOWN

Requested fund: ₳75,000

Number of designers/UX/UI needed: 1 - (Monthly salary average: ₳6500)

Number of content editor/analyser: 1 - (Monthly salary average: ₳6500)

Number of project managers/coordinators: 1 - (Monthly salary average: ₳13000)

Number of Web developers needed: 2 - (Monthly salary average: ₳15000)

Number of Haskell/Plutus developers needed: 2 - (Monthly salary average: ₳20000)

Estimated duration per milestone: 2 months

Estimated length of the project: 6 months

Cost for production of a video explanation: ₳7000

Extra costs including a year of cloud services: ₳7000

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Mario Altimari (Technical Lead)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/altimario/

I'm fully involved in the Cardano ecosystem and e-Learning space, which I believe is very important for people's good. I'm also a technical delivery manager at Mlabs.

I have 22+ years of experience in IT, I started my career as a software developer in the far 1999. I was a forerunner in 2006 of distance learning solution, participating in building the Italian Government e-learning platform “FAD” (Formazione A Distanza). I'm passionate about open source and data stream processing on distributed systems, so I built “Data Cruncher” <https://github.com/AltiMario/DataCruncher> the 1st data quality firewall on the market.

Bence Lukacs (Instructional Designer)

<https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencelukacs>

Benjamin Heurich (Education Scientist)

<https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-heurich-171b7027/>

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The project is being delivered at a remarkably low cost, thanks to the generous contribution of our talented team members. They have agreed to accept reduced compensation in exchange for a stake in the ownership of the platform, which demonstrates their commitment and confidence in its success other than the importance of the topic for the social good.

For the Cardano ecosystem, it is value for money because this project is not only for improving the Plutus pioneer program, but it also set the foundation for a decentralised e-learning platform based on Cardano. It's the first of its kind in the crypto industry.