Topic: Idea: Courses - page 4. (Read 2287 times)

The first thing that crossed my mind is a mandatory course to anyone who wish to earn money through bounty on this forum: how to behave, how to post, etc.

---

This is an important point, and definitely the way to go. It's always more efficient and productive to encourage people instead of blaming them. People would take better care of their account (and credential) with their hard earned merit, courses, trust, etc.

I chatted with JetCash about these services.

He has great ideas, but they will not succeed without a strong user base.  Instead of making people create another account, leverage the account they already own, and attach services to that.  He needs to build tools that people can use on this forum.



Good point.  Go where the members and structure are...

I do not know if the forum has the structure needed for something like that. There are thousands of other structures much better prepared.

But I believe that the forum could be used to debate more ideas and concepts between people who do not totally dominate a subject. That is, they could have specific sections, with suggestions of supporting materials and guides where the average user could discuss the subject and study more about. Maybe with designated tutors. Experts on a given subject, helping and moderating.

I, for example, do not understand practically anything about most of the new protocols or about second layer solutions in Bitcoin. Having a section targeted with a roadmap and many reading suggestions plus a dedicated space for discussions could be interesting.

And as it is a brainstorming, I leave as a suggestion that courses on economics could be very interesting as well. Especially about game theory. One of the most spectacular courses on this subject and that is free can be found here:

https://youtu.be/nM3rTU927io
YaleCourses
Game Theory (ECON 159)

I like the idea a lot. The challenge as I see it is less in creating the content, however, and more in getting people to use it.

Of the topics you've listed a number of them already have guide threads stickied in various places. People don't read them. Just look at Jet Cash's excellent Fit To Talk project which was struggling to find participants, even with the promise of some merit on the line.

Having said that, if we are looking at this not just as a way of improving the forum, but also as a way of improving the entire crypto community, it's a great idea.

I'd like to assume this is because of my thread asking for consolidation/recognition of education threads?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/guide-subforum-4511686

I don't have any concrete plans for this at all, but I've been thinking recently that the Bitcoin community desperately needs some high-quality, unbiased online courses, and perhaps bitcointalk.org would be a good place to host such a thing. This is just a brainstorming thread.

Example courses that come to mind:

---

Introductory cryptocurrency investing
 - The main focus would be not getting scammed and not losing all of your money.
 - It would be very careful not to endorse any particular sites, investments, or trading methods.
 - Overall extremely conservative, to balance out all of the pump around here.
 - It might be similar to the sort of material on investor.gov, but less authoritarian (eg. no "only trust SEC-approved things") and with more cryptocurrency focus.
 Using English naturally online
 - Tips targeted at non-native English speakers for acting naturally online.
Being a constructive bitcointalk.org member
Making money online
 - SANE tips for making money, especially for people in less-developed countries. No unwise things like gambling or high-risk investing, and no non-constructive things like spamming the forum with garbage.
Basic cryptocurrency concepts
Accepting Bitcoin payments
Implementing Bitcoin
 - A long & advanced course on implementing a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency largely from scratch in Python or another easy language. (Some of my best courses in university had this model, where you're provided a bunch of library code and then you glue it together by writing a few hundred lines for each assignment, at the end of the course getting some sort of complete thing.)
 

---

Some different/modified software would be needed. The existing threads structure is not at all suitable. Neither are wiki pages, since they're too easily messed-with. Maybe some suitable online-course software already exists. It'd be cool if the courses were internally gamified a bit, maybe with "achievements" and stuff. And it could be integrated with the main forum, eg. giving you badges on your profile if you completed a course.

A real challenge, which I'm not exactly sure how to solve, would be to keep them up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased. 99.9% of introductory cryptocurrency info on the Internet is basically an advertisement for something, and therefore not very useful. If anyone could create a course and publish it on equal standing with the other courses, then we'd end up with a huge pile of altcoin-pump courses, "how to make money using totally-safe HYIPs", and stuff like that. But if courses are only written by trusted & competent people after significant mod review, then only a limited number of courses could be created, and they'd probably quickly become outdated. Perhaps it'd work to do a github-style pull-request format led by some trustworthy editors. (Github could even be used, though that's pretty difficult to use for people not already familiar with git.)

Thoughts?