Topic: Idea: Courses - page 2. (Read 2287 times)

As I mentioned earlier, I've installed an educational package on a domain as an experiment.

This is not intended to be a permanent project, but just an initial experiment. I'll probably take the site down in a few months. I'm in KFC at the moment, and it'a a bit hot here. I'll go to McD tomorrow ( their air con is better), and I'll do a bit of formatting, and you guys can comment. I'll just add a couple of the threads from Fit to Talk as examples.

Setting this all this in motion is no easy feat, so perhaps additional inputs could be obtained through sampling the idea in a couple of threads as you suggest. It would need to be rather guided to avoid a spamfest of jibberish and turn it into something useful.

Also some sort of proof of concept at some preliminary stage could be approached by means of a pilot test. That is, before deploying a full project and all that it entails, start with one course a kind (less ambitious than a full deployed platform) and see how people react to it, as a means to calibrate the target audience’s reaction. I figure that there are multiple, and that the idea from theymo’s opening statement is to be as broad as possible, but the ties to rewards (merit, badges) would need to be managed with care so as not to focus just on some specific profiles as a result, in the line of what @suchmoon indicates.

It's an outstanding idea really. It can help to people who came here for "wrong" reasons, but are interested in educating themselves and developing. I would love to participate personally.
I also believe that ideally it should be made in some form of contest, so after some time you have to "unlock" next level. That will help to eliminate those who aren't really interested in studying.

Is it worth starting a thread about courses on the beginners board to see what reaction it gets.

Perhaps theymos could elaborate a bit on who he thinks the target audience would be. It should be wider than that. Maybe it could attract new forum users who are not bounty hunters.

I've installed ILIAS on a domain, and I'm exploring that at the moment. I'll throw it open to you guys when I understand it a bit more. It looks a lot more complex than I though. and it seems to be able to create a complete University with courses, tutor groups and projects.

This is the official demo site.

https://www.demo.ilias.de/ilias.php?baseClass=ilrepositorygui&reloadpublic=1&cmd=frameset&ref_id=1

Just a few thoughts on the matter at hand:

The online courses would certainly be nice to have around, since they are better suited for the visual kind of person who dreads taking on the challenge of reading books on the topics at hand, and should be an easier resource to tackle for those that have language difficulties.
Each course would probably require having a structure broken-up by levels to facilitate focusing on one subtopic at a time, thus easing the learning curve.
Whether the courses end up with an online exam or not (per course or per level) depends essentially on the reward that is on the other end. That is, is Bitcointalk Course badges a part of the outcome, or merit, or prestige, then some sort of control needs to be implemented to verify the knowledge acquired. If not, then examless courses are a viable option.

I’ve got conflicting thoughts on the idea of getting badges for taking (and passing) the different courses if integrated on Bitcointalk: on the one hand, it should incentivize people to perform the courses mainly to acquire the underlying knowledge but also as a sense of pride. On the other hand If the number of courses is high(ish) with time, some user profiles could look like decorated generals with uncountable little icons under their profile like a wall of medals. If the badges stand out a lot it could look a bit awkward.
Also, if exams were to be part of the deal, I’m not sure how the qualies should be managed. Perhaps a simple pass/no pass should suffice to avoid a back-to-school habit of comparing qualies and creating visions on people based on their grades.
 
I would favour the courses themselves being tied as much as possible to the forum itself, being a proprietary feature, since it could help to boost it’s profile and position as well as to underline it’s mission.
There are multiple technological challenges associated to the idea itself, that multiply I guess if you try to perform the integration in the current Forum software, whilst having the new Forum software on the roadmap at the same time. Perhaps an external online course platform would give you better functional feasible options that trying to embed it all to the Forum´s software, although some sort of integration would ideally exists (to control user access, rewards and so on). 
Regardless, implementation one way or another will always be feasible, but I figure at this stage that brainstorming at all levels is part of the idea (concept, scope, format, reward, technology, integration, cost, roi, etc.)

I figure that the "Accepting Bitcoin payments" chapter is where the concepts and case examples of how to use bitcoin in day to day activities would be explained. This could ideally be a good booster to bitcoin acceptance and usage (provided network transaction speed and cost improve in the short term). If would be brilliant if multiple real case applications were set here as examples and build a base of cases to help people understand how to do it.

Deep down I do have the feeling though that those most interested in the online courses, if tied to the Bitcointalk Forum, would be a largely a subset of the merited users. I believe the strategical goal is greater than that nevertheless…

About the carrot and the stick: The stick is that you may loose your money if you don´t bother to read. The carrot is saving your money, but let´s sweeten the deal by using merit to those "students" who prove themselves worth of it.

And I would not go further than that. We can teach those who are willing to learn, that is, I can help someone who doesn´t know, but I not willing to motivate someone who doesn´t care (even about their own money). I you are not even willing to read I can´t help you. That doesn´t mean that the material has to be boring or picture-less, but difficult things are difficult.

Investing is not equivalent to speculation. I can invest to speculate or I can invest to generate a new business, create new jobs and generate something worth for the world. But I think that the title is not really the main issue.

ICO analysis should include Due Diligence for non-professionals, Business Analysis, Technology Analysis, Economic model analysis and many more topics.

Most of the people in the forum don´t grasp simple concepts such as the Market Cap, the value of a token, the real legal implications of an ICO, their rights (or the lack of these more precisely).

As for the the "white papers" that are normally published, most would not even pass the minimum filter of a half-witted accredited investor.

This is not about discouraging people to invest, but about discouraging poor projects to snatch the funds from the users of this forum and create a bad image for the sector, the forum and the senior members.

I think this is a very healthy discussion.

This is something I've been thinking on for the last 24 hours. The best I could come up with is to disable signatures unless a required selection of courses has been completed. However, this will just create a bigger market for account farmers, and I can't see a way to prevent that.

Great! Thanks for this information, I have completed courses in edX, I stopped studying for a while and I am not updated with these courses, but it is worth checking out. The platform is easy to use and it is a great achievement to complete a course of prestigious Universities and Institutions such as The Linux Foundation.

The idea of theymos is pretty good and really he is right, the community needs education in cryptocurrencies. Perhaps a news bulletin or articles in Medium and Steemit reporting on these courses could give positive results for the community and it is in the interest of the members to take the courses, improve the quality and skills of their jobs.

Among the concerns of theymos is to use some platforms like GitHub I could confess that it is not so difficult I learned to use the platform with this course Html CSS Javascript for Web Developers and I also think that GitHub has an easy tutorial to learn.

I applaud this initiative because you all know more about our needs because you have more time in bitcointalk it is good to recognize that it is a feeling, so that our community improves in quality.

I'm quite skeptical of this idea and not so much on the implementation side, which is a challenge for sure but I've seen plenty of bright and enthusiastic people on this forum who could make it happen and would probably welcome a chance to build something inherently positive. To me the more important question is - already expressed by some other posters above me - how do we (or do we even attempt to) entice those who really need that education? We could build the nicest tastiest most beautiful carrot but seeing how many newbies here have a complete disregard for the rules of their "workplace" - how do we get them to eat their veggies without a big-ass stick? If there is one thing we learned from the merit system it's that even when their source of income is threatened (and that's a pretty big stick) some/most folks actively resist any chance of improvement but rather whine and moan about some perceived unfairness.

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Perhaps not the best title, but the concept is good. It could be focused on what NOT to do, due diligence, risks of irreversible pseudonymous payments, lack of legal recourse etc. Let's face it - people are already being misled in so many horrible ways that any education on the topic would be an improvement.

The problem with these ideas, as with everything, is that people don't read.
People google up whatever they want to find and skim over words to find what they want as fast as possible.
And so people get scammed and learn untrue stuff.

If someone wanted to learn something, it should be pretty straightforward and simple to catch those people. They're the same who most often get scammed. I'm afraid some content that's trying to stay as neutral as possible, without mentioning any services and so on, will get skipped by big majority of those who would get scammed i.e. the target.

edit:
Something that was planned earlier elsewhere: Quiz must be passed before access is granted. Then the Quiz would also educate people and one would need to answer correctly to the Quiz questions. It would be quite simple, but still something that requires attention as it has to be passed in order to access whatever resources. E.g. such kind of quiz could be used before one can access marketplace section here.

I think that is a good idea to generate resources for learning.

My main observation is that the task is much more difficult than it looks and an effort is required to keep it as simple as possible.

Sorry to disagree on the way of doing it, I think that the Forum is more than enough to generate and host these learning resources and it has some clear advantages:

It is probably more than enough for the first "editions" to use PDF, diagrams and (only maybe) videos hosted in public file hosting sites. Creating a full course with interaction, tests, discussions, etc... requires quite a long time and effort and it may be much better to start small and then grow, taking into account that this would be mostly voluntary work.

This initiative could and IMO should increase the value of this forum. Including the resources and links in the forum, even creating and specific section, would effective contribute to its utility and to the expansion of the user base.

Regarding the issues of governance and management, each topic on a thread, each thread with one "owner" that moderates and updates the content and possibly a specific sections for the guides. This way you have clear accountability. If one of the "topic managers" cannot continue doing a proper work, it would have to be replaced.

Each topic thread will probably have more than one contributor and possibly this contributions could be done in shared docs (typically google docs) before having the first versions available in the forum.

Personally, I have been playing with the idea of creating and ICO analysis document, but I have tons of work at the moment, so it would have to be at a very slow pace. I may be able to translate some of the materials, again as long as speed is not of paramount importance.

P.S. I need to understand better what is "Using English naturally online", perhaps because I can´t use English naturally online.

P.S.S. A question: As it is described, is the idea of these materials to discourage investing in altcoins and speaking mainly of bitcoin?

P.S.S.S I recently reached the l33t post. Good pun.

I would appreciate these courses really, I am still a bit lost in the forum, even if I am not a newbie in crypto, there is a lot in here to explore and too much misinformation.

Twine is actually a great idea. With Sugarcube you can easily go forward and back through the material, link to extra or external resources, use multimedia files, etc. as well as allowing users to save their progress to return to at a later date.

In terms of having real life educators involved - I have postgraduate teaching qualifications, regularly teach at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, and am regularly appraised and evaluated on my teaching to keep my methods and skills up-to-date. However, I have no qualifications in tech, computing, or anything even remotely related to Bitcoin or blockchain technology. I'm not sure how helpful I could be in overseeing material that I potential don't understand myself, and I'm sure the same applies of others. I think you might need to find someone who educates specifically in the tech field to take this on.

There are some educational CMS packages in Softaculous. I'm happy to provide a domain name and hosting, and I'll install the CMS. I can cover the cost with ads for my domain registrar and the hosting company, so it wouldn't cost the forum anything. I won't have time to administer any of the courses, so that would be down to you guys.

If there is any interest, then I'll post a list of suitable CMS for you guys to choose the best. I think some of the packages allow for integration with outside sites.

http://www.softaculous.com/apps/educational

I found a list of the educational CMS packages

A particularly simple way to do it might be to use Twine. Twine creates completely-client-side HTML+JavaScript pages. It's intended for interactive fiction, but I don't think that it'd be much of a stretch to use it for courses. Then the course construction could be done on github, and the github work could be automatically compiled into HTML+JS and dumped on courses.bitcointalk.org with some server-side integration added in.

It seems that there is an open-source EDX platform which could be used, but it seems really complex, and especially difficult for many people to create/modify a course collaboratively.


Yeah, I'd like to write some of the technical material, but I won't have time to oversee it properly. I also don't know much about the science of pedagogy. I'd be nice if someone with some teaching experience would volunteer to oversee the whole thing.

Accepting Bitcoin payments and other basics are detailed in bitcoin.org, IMO it would be the perfect website to add up and implement the idea of additional courses. Yeah, using English naturally online only stands out, but I guess it could be added up with other informational/educational material.

Being a constructive bitcointalk.org member, if it gets fixed rest of all falls in place. Engaging the users to be more contributing and constructive to only learn, but getting rewarded with achievements/merits at the end would encourage them to keep learning and making constructive posts at the same time if it's on the same domain, user engagement.

I think this is a Babel tower problem, sorry about that. English is not my first language and I am kind of asleep today:
- By "contest" I was meaning just to encourage the people to write useful things. For instance, if you an English teacher, then you will write something and, in the case to be good enough, well, it could be a part of the site. "Contest" is definitely a word I misused.



I neither meant the courses to be obligatory, but a "plus" also in here. For all those willing to learn, it will appear in here that that are already taking the courses. That's all. Of course, it must be optional, but with a "reward" in here, so they want to work harder.

About the mini quiz, I totally agree, it could be about the forum rules.

Thanks for the quote, sometimes I find difficult to express myself in English, I must take the English course, if created  


Jejee. Totally agree. It was just an idea, but you are the domain master in here 
A subdomain sounds great.