DLS Academy is a general purpose learning platform, so diversity is amongst our priorities. We offer an easy-to-use environment for both students and instructors, as well as a built-in incentive mechanism that will help the community grow and prosper. We don’t target businesses and corporations like “regular” VLEs, but the people who need it the most: students, beginners, career switchers, artists and so on.
DLS Academy is an inclusive, welcoming platform created for knowledge sharing of all kinds. Anyone can become an instructor and publish a course on any subject from programming to cooking or photography.Even more, instructors can publish video, audio or text based courses, depending on his beliefs or the particularities of the approached subject. For example, some consider a video based tutorial is easier to assimilate, while others argue that a text-based guide is a better option.
The instructors decide if they want to charge students for their course and what they think is a fair price for it. Although they have full control over the pricing, instructors have to deposit an amount of tokens equal to 10 times the course price, in order to enforce a cost-quality balance.
These tokens are just locked in a smart contract until a minimum threshold of 10 purchases is reached. In other words, if the course fails to attract at least 10 students, then the cost-quality balance is not met because either the course is overpriced or the quality is poor. In this case, the instructor loses his deposit. The lost tokens go to a reserve and get redistributed to users who contribute the most within the platform.
The course is published on IPFS.The InterPlanetary File System is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol that enables distributed storage across a network of computers. According to their own description, IPFS is a protocol, filesystem, web, cdn, peer to peer and uses crypto, all at the same time. If it sounds crazy, it is. But only because it is cutting-edge technology that is about to revolutionize the web.
Students have a key role in DLS Academy, they are also content curators, by reviewing the courses. This curation mechanism is connected to the reputation system, so reviews represent accurate, difficult to manipulate signals.Besides learning from courses, learning groups can be created, where students with similar interests can meet and help each other through live chat or creating non-real time discussions. By offering a helping hand to his peers, one can be endorsed by them and earn extra reputation and benefit from token redistribution.
In order to increase their chances for a good job, students can apply for a certification that attests their participation in a course and the information they assimilated. This would cost an extra fee that is shared between the course author and DLS Academy, so everyone is incentivized to provide quality certifications that will be recognized by companies.
Only students who paid the course’s fee (unless it was free) can review it and each student can publish a single review, so a malicious user who wants to manipulate the score will suffer some costs.The weight of a given review is proportional to the student’s reputation; a review coming from an active and respectable user counts more than one from a new or inactive user.Students who participate in the content curation process can earn extra reputation depending on the moment they publish the review (early reviews generate more reputation then late reviews) and the difference between their estimated score and the average score of that course (the closer these are, the more reputation is earned).
Read more about the project :http://dlsacademy.io
