Learn & Earn developed the following prototype for MOOC course completion through our participation in ETHGlobal’s 2020 HackMoney hackathon. Winners of Aavesome’s prize at Hackmoney 2020. Watch the demo here.
Problem
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platforms such as Khan Academy and Coursera grant people from all socio-economic backgrounds access to participate in higher education. As of 2018, online course completion rates for virtually free education have decreased to just over 3%. How far along did you get in your online course before jumping ship? The typical response after course registration is to complete the first week of modules, get distracted or reasonable, and finally abandon it.
Learn & Earn Hypothesis: Students with the intent of completing a course have no real consequence, accountability, or incentive to finish.
Solution
Student Model: Learn & Earns DeFi (Decentralized Finance) application asks students to stake 100 DAI (around $100 USD), refundable upon completion of their course. If a student passes all the tests required by the course before the MOOCs defined duration of the end of the course, the student realizes their original amount, plus interest, plus the divided total of all students who did not complete the course.
Donor Model: Imagine you are a loaded business(wo)man and want to contribute to art history students. In our model, donors can stake their cryptoassets and donate the interest gained over time to students participating in the course. As a donor, you can choose to remove your stake at any time, which is crucial because it gives donors autonomy and flexibility over their assets.
Assumptions & Challenges
- Earn & Learn chose to use Khan Academy as an example for the hackathon.
- Learn & Earn requires an identity system to prevent cheating. We assume that this problem can be solved through a partnership with a MOOC platform.
- The return of stake to students and donors faces an issue of DAI price volatility in USD.
- A challenge will be ensuring students are not participating just to earn money.
Technology
The objective of DeFi is to give people full control of their assets. Students can create an incentive to finish courses by staking funds and playing to win back their money and more if they have the integrity to fulfill on their promise to complete the course materials. Donors donate the interest of their cryptoassets to students and can retract their cryptoassets out of the staking state at any point in time. Please see the image below for an overview of the technology stake used to make this possible:
- Portis: This wallet will interface
- Chainlink Alarmclock: Chainlink was used to trigger each smart contract at a specified time.
- Aave: Aavesome’s DeFi platform allows donors and students to stake and earn interest for the duration of the course.
a. Chrome Extention: Learn & Earn developed a Chome extension
→ This extension injects a button onto, ie. Khan Academy’s website that allows a user to play the Learn & Earn game.
b. Front End: User authentication occurs by requiring students to sign up or sign in through Portis. Once integrated with an email and password, Portis manages a student’s private key inside their existing browser and links them to Learn & Earns database on the back end.
The critical element here is Learn & Earn leverages Portis’s end to end encryption architecture for security. Once signed in, students can stake 100 DAI through their Portis wallet.
c. Smart Contract: A student will have a set buy-in period to stake 100 DAI in their course of choice. Once the course starts, the student must finish all course materials before the allotted time is up, or they forfeit their stake. One contract is written per course to handle all the pools for that course. Separate smart contracts will always guarantee that the pool currently in its buy-in period is differentiated to the next pool to mature.
When a pool is “initialized,” it creates two Chainlink requests that it then sends over to the alarm clock chainlink deployed on Ropsten. One of these requests signals the end of the buy-in period of a pool, triggering the deposit of that pools’ DAI balance into Aave. A new request (for the end of the next buy-in period) is sent to the chainlink network.
The second chainlink request signals the maturity of the next pool, at which point that pool’s aDAI (Aave) balance redeems and gets distributed among the list of completers.
d. Back End: The frontend makes requests to the backend on behalf of the user to proceed through the various stages of the application. The background process monitors transactions and state changes on the blockchain.
- keeps track of student authentication,
- monitors the DAI smart contract for the students that have staked,
- checks for new pool creations, and;
- updates pool statuses: ie. updates smart contract upon the student’s smart contract completion.
Thanks for reading, see below for a demo of the tool!
