Web3 x Teacher Tech: $TEACHER DAO
Web3 x Teacher Tech: $TEACHER DAO
With 100M teachers globally, it's a powerful community of creators. Yet, it goes through challenges like plagiarism & monetisation- which further disincentivises teachers. Can Web3 solve it? Find out!
Welcome to Old Rope. I write on emerging trends from the East! 🌏 Subscribe to stay updated.
Over the last few weeks, I have spent considerable time studying Web3, and I am particularly excited about the humanization of apps built on blockchain (‘Dapps’). So far, most of the apps built in the Web3 universe are more accustomed to crypto-natives, but going forward the value is going to be unlocked in real world cases, where the end user need not understand Web3 to avail its benefits.
One of the exciting use cases could be a Teacher DAO - to solve some painstaking problems for teachers as well as fundamental issues in the education system.
What is a DAO? 🧐
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program (smart contract) that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a central authority.
A DAO "enables online communities to form, pool resources, and coordinate towards common goals - all run trustlessly via code." -Ali Ahaya, a16z
Governance in DAOs plays an important role in empowering the community to vote upon proposals and take crucial decisions without letting any central authority to take control.
Recently, 17K individuals came together as ‘Constitution DAO’ to purchase one of the 13 surviving original copies of the American Constitution, pooling together over $40M (more here). The power of communities is astronomical, which is why DAOs will be implemented across industries to solve real world problems.
Teacher Creator Community 👨🏫🎨
The teacher community has a tremendous scope to help each other in up skilling, job search, exchange pedagogy, lesson plans, etc.e, and ultimately transcend to improved learning outcomes for students.
Teachers are an important part of the creator economy - designing tricks and tips, pedagogy and lesson plans for better learning experience for students. At the same time, teachers often look up content and resources online which they can use for particular topics.
Platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, Quizizz, etc. have content hosted by teachers across the world, like:
However, there are times when teachers do not get credit or monetary benefits for the resources they create.
Platforms like ‘Teachers Pay Teachers’ have solved the problem of monetization, as it is a marketplace of teaching resources. It has enabled teachers to sell unique content, with some teachers making up to $1M annually.
But…it is not all that rosy. There are several instances of plagiarism on Teachers Pay Teachers, simple because there are always some bad actors in every community.
Due to lack of monetization and plagiarism, teachers are disincentivized to share their uniquely created resources. Moreover, it also disincentivizes teachers to come up with new innovative material to use in their classrooms. This can potentially hinder innovative learning experiences for students.
This problem can be solved to some extent by setting up the right system of incentivization, in a decentralized manner, where governance lies with the community.
Teacher DAO - a powerful teacher community, by the teachers, for the teachers 🌐
Ownership 📝
Decentralised platform built on blockchain, where teachers (authors) can share free as well as paid content, as NFTs.
NFTs → A non-fungible token is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a digital ledger. NFTs can be associated with reproducible digital files such as photos, videos, and audio.
This would ensure that authors of content have a unique identity and can sell/ rent several copies of their content to other teachers.
Teachers can also collaborate with teachers on the platform and host content together.
Monetisation ₿
For the paid content, teachers (authors) can receive tokens <$TEACHER> which they could either exchange for fiat money or purchase content by other teachers (authors).
Incentivisation ✨
Natural question: How do you ensure that teachers do not screenshot the content and circulate it without credits?
One of the most exciting things about DAOs is that it helps re-imagining incentive structures within organisations.
This can be solved (not foolproof) with setting up incentivization through smart contracts. As teachers (consumers) use content of teachers (authors) on the platform, their ranking on the platform improves and access to more free content opens up, with time and activity. At the same time, if a teacher is accused of misconduct (plagiarism) by other teachers, the community can decide to reduce/ revoke access for the teacher.
Portfolio Creation 🖼️
Just like artists, teachers can also have their digital resumes created on chains which can further help them find relevant jobs, as with advent of EdTech, there is a strong case for ‘meta-versity’.
Building a DAO might seem very complicated but we have projects like Aragon which provides a platform to build DAO.
There are several other use-cases of Web3 which have been identified in EdTech- like learn to earn [earn rewards in tokens for completion of learning milestones], credentials [transcripts issued by universities on blockchain], metaversity [learning experiences built in metaverse], etc.
Would love to chat more about other real-world use-cases of Web3, or if you are planning to build Teacher DAO 😉