Building an Educational Platform Around Blockchain Technology
The journey from an empty folder to an online academy on blockchain tech, online privacy and more.
This article is meant to describe my personal experience with building the Horizen Academy. I want to state upfront that the entire process was a team effort. I had the help of our lovely graphic designer, Linda, Tuan, an incredibly talented web developer, and Erica who did a great job with the proofreading process. Additionally, I want to thank Mac and Gus for their continuous support, as well as the rest of the team for helping out whenever needed!
It was almost exactly one year ago that I got in contact with the ZenCash project. I joined the team’s BD division a little later in April 2018 before their rebrand to Horizen in August 2018.
One of the first things I did after being onboarded was looking through our internal documents to see what was going on at that point. I came across a folder named Zen Academy and immediately knew this was something I wanted to work on. Unfortunately, the folder was empty, so I started asking around what the plans for this project were.
Somebody had this idea a while ago, but it didn’t really take off. Still, everybody I talked to was highly interested in bringing the Horizen Academy to life.
I have my background in chemistry and have been teaching at the University of Innsbruck for a few years now. I guess I have a strong affinity for creating educational content and sharing knowledge in general, as I always enjoyed lecturing. I thought an educational platform might be the best way for me to contribute to our project.
CS50
During the summer of ‘18, I took the CS50 course offered by Harvard University on EdX. To me, this online course was setting an entirely new standard for how to do education online.
The amount of thought that went into designing this course and its assignments, as well as the infrastructure provided was outstanding. Obviously, their course went through many iterations until it became what it is today, but I was seriously impressed. If you were looking for a place to start learning about computational science, look no further.
Experiencing first hand how well educational content can be presented while already thinking about the Horizen Academy raised my motivation immensely!
Objective
The main objective of the Academy is to make the knowledge we are able to share accessible to as many people as possible. Knowledge is, to some degree, a prerequisite for adoption and we would like to foster adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology through education.
One might think that Google already does a pretty good job at this but I think this is only partially true: It is easy to find content on any given keyword. You don’t know what Proof of Work is? Hit Google and find a plethora of articles.
The problem is that half of the articles users will find are too advanced for them, while the other half doesn’t include enough detail. I’ve certainly found myself in this position many times while I was getting started with crypto. It is difficult to find content that is just right for you.
The goal was to make the content of our Academy adapt to the user's needs. The approach we wanted to take was to create the same content in three levels: Beginner, Advanced, and Expert. If a user is to start reading an article and realizes, that it is too detailed or complex he can move down a level and find the same concept explained in simpler terms. If the content is too trivial, the user can move up one level.
The Start
After a few messages and emails, a group within our Horizen team formed and we started having bi-weekly calls to discuss the scope of the project. We decided to start with written content only. Since one of our core values is privacy we decided to cover online privacy as well as blockchain technology.
Additionally, an introduction to the history of cryptocurrencies was considered valuable by everybody attending the calls as well as a list of curated resources. We dedicated another topic to the Horizen project and created an ELI5 section.
Defining the Content
We started out with a list of topics/articles that we wanted to cover. In the next step, we were grouping these articles into preliminary chapters. With this structure worked out, we started to populate the different chapters within the different levels with topics, that we felt are appropriate for the given type of user.
After the high-level structure was defined I started typing away. The first two articles I completed were originally meant to be in the Beginner section. After collecting some feedback we moved them to the Advanced Level, for they were considered too detailed for beginners. We ended up using the entire initial structure (meant for Beginners) as a starting point for the Advanced content and created a sort of light version for the new Beginner section.
While we were working on the first few articles of the revised structure, we realized that we needed to take another step back and work on a specification for the different levels of content. We came up with these rough specs in our working document.
This first specification translated into the description below, that you can now find in our introduction to the technology section.
If I were to set these specs up again, I would be way more precise about them from the beginning. In hindsight, I realized that spending additional hours on planning an article or a chapter saves at least twice that time during the writing process. On the other hand, I feel like sometimes I just have to start typing for a while, until I can start to fathom what is needed to make an article work.
Defining the Structure and Content Mapping
Going back to our main objective, creating content for everybody regardless of their prior knowledge we wanted to allow the user to adapt the content to their needs.
In order to make this possible, we needed a consistent structure throughout the different levels of content. Having defined the chapters helped a lot with this already. The next step was to think of the content mapping: If a user starts reading an article and decides to switch the level because the content is too simple/advanced for them, which article is he taken to?
For some articles this mapping was straightforward. All levels have an article on Blockchain as a Data Structure in the chapter “What is a Blockchain?”. The trouble starts with more advanced concepts. As an example, we chose to exclude hash functions from the Beginner Level all together.
We are still working on the content mapping and it is by no means finished. For now, we chose to direct a user to the introduction of the equivalent chapter in case there is no corresponding article in there. E.g. the article on Hash Functions in the Advanced Level maps back to the introduction of the Chapter “How Does a Blockchain Work?” in the Beginner Level while the Article “The Elements of a Blockchain” maps to its simpler brother.
We also try to provide useful cross-references within the articles, so users don’t have to search the structure too much. If you have input on how to approach this content mapping problem, let me know!
What is the Right Amount of Detail for a Beginner?
Once you have spent some time in the crypto space it may seem like the Beginner Level is missing some important concepts. We decided to do so on purpose. If it is the right decision is a discussion in and of its own.
It is one of the most difficult questions to determine which concepts are critical to gain a basic understanding of the technology in general, and which concepts are more confusing. Although a huge amount of educational content on the topic has been created over the last couple of years, we still don’t have best practices on how to teach blockchain.
I personally feel that this decision needs to based on understandability/usability rather than correctness. A beginner should get the big picture first, without being confused with said hash functions, smart contracts, and the intricacies of PoW.
Target Audience
Many design decisions have to be made with the target audience in mind. But who is the target audience? At the moment one can probably focus on rather young, tech interested folks with a medium to high education. But ultimately, we wish to make crypto and blockchain accessible to everybody, regardless of their level of education.
Especially the people in regions that have a poor standard of education are the ones that can benefit most from decentralized money.
So we have to ask ourselves: Is the Beginner Level beginner friendly enough? We do have an ELI5 (Explain it Like I’m 5) section that explains the technology in even simpler terms and we might choose to place this more prominently on our website as a starting point for absolute beginners.
We also want to expand our content-portfolio with videos and animations, but for now, the highest priority item on the to-do list clearly is finishing the Expert Level for Technology and Online Privacy.
This article was dedicated to the content of our Academy. I will try to make time to talk about the thought process behind our Academy’s UI and UX in another article.
Lessons Learned and Open Questions
My personal takeaways from the process of building the Horizen Academy are that one should not be afraid to spend a lot of time on the drawing board, before actually getting to work. This proved to be true not only for creating the content but also for setting up a file structure to keep track of the different articles and infographics. A little more planning could have avoided many restructuring sessions.
Migrating the content from our collaborative tool to the actual website was another process that went suboptimal. We started the migration process a bit too early, which led to inefficiencies when last-minute changes had to be applied to the content.
Determining what concepts a beginner should understand first was another big task and I would appreciate any constructive feedback on our structure and content in general.
Thanks for reading, enjoy your day!
If you liked what you have found here make sure to follow my Medium account, it is much appreciated. You can also find me on twitter.
