I recently came across the RabbitHole DAO, which is exploring the approach of Proof-of-Learn.

I’ve barely gotten my feet wet and still have a ton to absorb, but the basis of the approach to create an ‘on-chain resume’ is this:

⭕ Earn XP / tokens for completing tasks
✔️All current tasks are on-chain activities and are therefore consensus verified somehow (depending on the chain protocol)
🎓 If tasks are properly structured, then by completing the right amount (in the right order, perhaps) you can be said to have “completed a course”

Here on Hive, the good ol’ @hivebuzz system demonstrates this. As you do more Hive things, you earn badges that are automatically verified by the blockchain. So if you wanted to prove to someone that you’re a veteran Hivean, you could point them to your badges.

My goal in this post is to expand this model beyond just web3 and try to imagine how this could be applied in a broader, interactive, decentralized system of educators and learners.

Below is a loose set of ideas and components that could contribute, and I’d welcome any and all thoughts to help crystallize the concepts. 😃

Note
Most of this thinking applies to adult learning, and not kids. There’s no reason to think that the concepts here couldn’t be applied in public or private schools for children, but I suspect that most early adoption will be in higher education.

Proposed overall approach to decentralized education

We want people to obtain, retain, and then use knowledge
In the web3 broad vision, institutions would have less power (not no power) in dictating what knowledge people obtain and how they do it
We need a way for people to own their knowledge and experience credentials
We need a job market that accepts Web3 validated credentials

Key assumption: Rabbithole model is valid
For the thinking below, I’ll assume that the idea of on-chain task-based activity as the valid, bedrock system that underpins everything.

(A) 🔝 The role of curation: surfacing the best tasks

Who decides what tasks should constitute a “course?" How do you structure a credential that a third party will take seriously and that holds real value?

A DAO could come together and build out courses. I imagine that’s how Rabbithole does it today. (I believe they call task-sets "quests.")

But I think a curation model could work as well, maybe in tandem with DAO governance. Imagine a Hive-like system that elevated quality task-sets to the top of a list.

(B) ✅ Ensuring quality with subject matter experts

I think this would be a big area of pushback from traditional education proponents:

“Sure, some random people on the Internet voted this “course” to the top, but how do you really know that the tasks inside constitute real value, real learning? You need an expert to verify!”

I think this is where Creator economies (such as Rally.io) could intersect. Some people will build up a reputation for having course building expertise entirely online and anonymously. Others can use their existing non-web3 reputations to get a jumpstart (e.g. professors, tutors).

You could use the value of the creator’s personal economy or some sort of community rating (ala Hive reputation) to give them more weight in evaluating certain courses.

(C) 🖇️ Tokenizing off-chain tasks

This needs to be answered in order to expand the educational system past web3 topics and at least into digital.

If the topic of learning is “public speaking” how do you translate associated tasks on-chain? Can you? Should you? There are definitely ways (upload a video, somehow verify that that is you), but there will be limits on just how well certain tasks translate into the web3 space.

VR and AR tech may be an eventual bridge to this, if the tech becomes accessible / affordable to people.

(D) ✒️ Space for manual evaluation and verification

The blockchain can only give consensus that something happened, but not necessarily on if it was done “well.”

Lots of task completion has a subjective, highly human component to it. You need experts or intended recipients to judge your skill and say whether or not you completed a task in a satisfactory way (and who decides what is satisfactory?)

This will be another key hurdle, and it is related to point (B). There should be some thinking around how we incentivize verified experts to manually and fairly evaluate certain tasks that can’t be easily ranked.

This could become a key job in the future. Here’s one way I can imagine it happening:

Learners earn tokens for interacting with the system, like we do here on Hive
If they need a completed task/course manually evaluated, they can bid or pay those tokens to evaluators (because the to the learner, the credential has more potential value than the token)
Alternatively, the learner’s company or DAO might sponsor them instead, paying the token cost

(E) 🏛️ Space for traditional education to interface

There should be a lot of thought on how to gently and meaningfully onboard both traditional education and web2 edTech into this world. It is likely that a hybrid web2-web3 approach would exist as the world adjusts to the new technology and possibilities in this space. It may even end up that the existing educational structures are better positioned for some kinds of learning (CPR training comes to mind).

(F) 🔐 Security for the masses

For wider adoption of this, we will probably need a better system for securing on-chain resources. A wallet is a single point of failure in many cases… lose your key, and now you not only lose your $$ but your entire educational resume and credentials? Right now it’s not really possible for someone to “steal” my university degree as it's guarded and guaranteed by a big fat centralized institution.

My general hope is that this is a topic being tackled from many directions in the web3 world. So that by the time decentralized education is more mainstream, so will better security options for wallets or digital identities.

💡 Closing thoughts

I’m excited to get to know the RabbitHole DAO better, and see if any of the above aligns with what they have in mind. I think that curation based systems like the social side of Hive could play an important role in decentralized education. The sidechain capacity of Hive could also potentially support some or all of these ideas… food for thought!