Topic: [ANN][ICO] Woolf, the first ‘university ICO’, launching on Stellar (Read 291 times)

Hi!

Thank you for your review on GlobalFromAsia. I would like to offer clarifications here on behalf of the team at Woolf:

1. Premise

Woolf will be the first fully accredited blockchain university in the world. By "university", we really mean it: it will cover most subjects taught in a traditional university - though with an initial focus on humanities and social sciences - and not only business and the like. As far as I know, there is no similar project on the market, and so the assertion that Woolf has a first-mover advantage, made in the Whitepaper, is right.

As noted earlier in the thread, Woolf has also been offered a clear pathway to full degree-granting powers in Europe within 6 months of submitting an application. This is also something remarkable and unprecedented for a blockchain educational project.

2. Team

I'd like to point out that some of our affiliate advisors, like Prof Ralf Bebenroth from Kobe University, have extensive experience in business and management, and that one of our senior advisors, Margaretta Colangelo, is a leading figure in Silicon Valley. More importantly, members of Woolf's Leadership Team have acted as expert advisors to government regulators on the accreditation of programmes, and members of Woolf's Advisory Board have been responsible for overseeing the establishment of several universities.

3. Token

For more details on why we decided to move from Ethereum to Stellar, see: https://medium.com/the-woolf-company-blog/the-technology-we-use-at-woolf-5a624f09a4b9

4. Risk

A distinction must be made between Woolf, the non-profit blockchain university that we are building (more specifically, the Woolf Trust, which is a non-profit charitable trust), and Woolf Development Ltd, the for-profit company whose mandate is to raise capital for making this possible.

For more details as to why members of Woolf Development have decided to run an ICO, see: https://medium.com/the-woolf-company-blog/the-first-university-ico-ab843ec1b062

Thank you for this review, and of course, we welcome your comments and questions!

Coming back to your comment on Woolf being "a fully independent academic institution" ---

Indeed, Woolf is in the process of becoming an independent university with its own degree-granting powers up to the doctoral level. Woolf will be open admissions for any qualified academic in the world and selective admissions for students.

Yet we regularly received requests from universities and consortiums around the world that would like to partner with Woolf. Why do these institutions approach us, and how does Woolf benefit its members through these partnerships? Here I note a few of the relevant issues.

What Woolf will Provide to Other Universities

1. Woolf aims to help universities retain talent. It is now the case, quite extraordinarily, that most faculty members at most major universities are on temporary contracts. Good universities struggle to retain talent, and faculty members struggle with uncertain career prospects. Woolf can help faculty members stay within their home university ecosystem even while they connect with other students and faculty around the world.

2. Woolf will provide teaching opportunities and income for recent doctoral graduates, postdoctoral researchers, and emeritus professors. Woolf expects to have full degree granting powers near the end of 2018 for anyone using the platform. Woolf uses a blockchain to enforce regulatory compliance so that faculty members anywhere in the world can provided courses that meet the benchmarks of accreditation.

3. Universities typically have a mandate to attract talented students from a wide range of backgrounds, but universities often fail to fulfil this goal. Woolf will provide educational outreach to a global network of students, many in locations that a single university could never afford to reach

4. Woolf helps to solve a major administrative planning problem for traditional university departments: uncertainty about whether there will be enough students or enough teachers to sustain a particular course of study. Woolf provides planning confidence by bringing network effects to the process: it provides a global pool of accredited teaching, and a global pool of accredited students. Universities that partner with Woolf have access to these resources. And Woolf will provide secure, automatically enforced, contractual commitments on a blockchain for planning purposes.

5. Woolf expands the geographical horizons of any university. Woolf aims to be the internet of universities. It will coordinate students and teachers between universities in order to provide the best fit for instruction and facilitate the free flow of information. Members of the platform will gain access to a powerful network of academic resources.

What Woolf Gains from Other Universities

1. Woolf benefits from network effects at greater scales, including greater refinement in the match between students and teachers, and a more predictable alignment between student demand and course offerings. Whenever Woolf partners with other universities, all of its members increase their own access to resources and benefit from network effects.

2. There are economic benefits to Woolf’s faculty members and its students. Scale provides greater choice between colleges on the platform, including economic choice. Yet there are also blockchain-specific economic benefits: increases in membership lead to a greater capitalisation of the global student tuition account, and which affects the value of the monthly inflation of 0.035% (see the white paper).

3. Partnering with existing universities removes uncertainty for those faculty members with contractual clauses preventing them for outside work. Partnership agreements demand that partner universities allow all their faculty members to teach for Woolf. But Woolf will always be open admissions to qualified faculty members who to make Woolf their primary affiliation.

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The Woolf platform uses a blockchain to diminish the middle layer of bureaucracy between the classroom and the regulator. Woolf will provide a profile of the data relevant to accreditation and compliancy status – in real time and at almost any level of granularity. By using a blockchain, Woolf can manage sensitive personal and financial information with banking-grade security. The platform is designed to offer students and teachers uncompromised ownership of their personal data, even while participating in the system.

The Woolf platform is designed to provide regulators with clarity and confidence about the compliancy status of teaching within Woolf. This is essential for a borderless university. We have been working closely with regulators to ensure that teaching will be accredited at Woolf without regard to geography or national affiliation.

Students benefit from studying in a well-regulated institution with efficient resource management. A blockchain enables the reduction, elimination, and automation of bureaucratic processes, which creates significant financial savings.  At Woolf we use these savings to design a highly personalised teaching experience, directly with academics.

A blockchain can provide confidence about the advertised performance of an institution, and about the performance of its teachers. This helps academics, institutions, and governments to see how an institution compares to their peers, and it allows them to quickly identify areas requiring improvement.

Blockchains will change the way higher education is managed, organised, and experienced.

Yes, we do have an agreement with specific jurisdictions and the process is ongoing.

As we say in the light paper, we will offer teachers the option to choose 'payment stabilisation' when teaching on the platform.

Our team at Woolf has come up with two core methods to stabilise the value of payments made in WOOLF tokens. These methods strictly provide stability for the value of a local payment made in WOOLF (e.g., for a teacher's salary) without stopping the overall fluctuation of WOOLF's price on the wider market.

If you want to read about the full details, please refer to §4 of the white paper, which can be found here: https://woolf.university/assets/doc/whitepaper.pdf

We are creating our own university able to operate completely independently from other institutions. We also have a strategy in place (details in the white paper) for allowing existing institutions to fully operate on top of our core platform and/or offload administrative procedures. Regarding accreditation, yes, it is a slow process, but we've been working on it all year and have a pathway to accreditation. See the previous post below:

That's a lot to unpack, so I'll summarize by saying we switched from Ethereum to Stellar because of the significantly cheaper transaction costs and because we can still run smart contracts in the form of chaincode on Hyperledger Fabric.

Here are some resources for further reading on the advantages of Stellar:

• Lumenauts unofficial guide to to Stellar: https://www.lumenauts.com/start
• Lumenauts Stellar IBM partnership: https://www.lumenauts.com/blog/how-the-partnership-between-ibm-and-stellar-works
• Galactic Talk forum on Stellar vs Ethereum: https://galactictalk.org/d/692-stellar-or-ethereum-which-benefits
• Coinspeaker on Stellar vs Ethereum: https://www.coinspeaker.com/2018/03/14/stellar-ico-platform-vs-ethereum-ico-platform/

Yes, Woolf will be a fully independent academic institution. Several members of the Woolf team are full-fledged academics who value academic quality, and understand the crucial importance of an accredited academic institution. This is why we have been working on accreditation since the very beginning. We are happy to say that Woolf has been offered a clear pathway to full degree-granting powers (up to the doctoral level) in Europe within 6 months of submitting an application.

Woolf provides new opportunities for both students and scholars. This is very good for the opportunities of students. I think the project will be a success

Hello Woolf University supporters,



Our team just wrote up an ICO review for Woolf, here’s a quick overview: Woolf introduces personal teacher-student education powered by the blockchain. It allows any students to participate while removing geographical, financial, and other barriers in the current education system.



We’d love your input and comments https://www.globalfromasia.com/investments/woolf-ico-review/

Thanks!

This project uses a great technology. I will follow the development progress of this project and will invest if this is a potential project. I hope the developers will update more news so that investors can keep track of the situation

Woolf will disrupt the economics of higher education by providing new opportunities for both students and academics. Woolf is developing an accredited platform on which students and teachers can connect – anywhere in the world. Woolf focusses on Oxbridge-style tutorials that prioritise personal interactions between teachers and students. Although the Woolf software platform is online, it will support both in-person and distance teaching.

Hnmnm. The project seems promising. But what are the measures on ground as regard risk factors and the volatility nature of crypto world. If this project can be achieved successfully. Then crypto have come to save humanity

Maybe they have some sort of agreement and a contract with these institutions. But if not, then the whole process will go very slowly, which does not exactly play a plus. So far, all the projects on this topic have not been very successful.

Will Woolf be a fully independent academic institution? Don't you have to go through a lot of certification processes in order to make sure that your offering complies with common standards? I thought that takes quite a while to get all accreditations.

Why do you prefer Stellar Network? What advantages it gives?

Solid team with doable roadmap. Vision is pretty fine, product is cool! The project has every chance to succeed.

how this will become an educational breakthrough with an ICO? what will be the usage of the fund and how it helps with university

wow means you will prioritize academics compared to employees who don't have a degree, in my opinion your project is very great, I believe if a project is controlled by expert academics, I'm sure all project problems will be resolved quickly