Detailed Plan
If built, our project has the potential to add users to Cardano from across the 1070+ institutions in the U.S. and Canada who are already using our library content.
Background:
Over the past few decades, the price of textbooks have consistently exceeded triple the rate of inflation.1 College students face steep price tags that averages around $625 per semester.2 This has led to institutions to re-negotiate or cancel their relationships with publishers.3 As a result, federal funding for Open Educational Resource (OER) creation with Creative Commons4 licensing keeps increasing, from $5+ million per year in FY18 and FY19 to $7+ million per year for FY20 and FY21.5
While the benefits to students have been myriad6, the current landscape is fragmented and the lack of proper infrastructure has imposed restrictions on both content creation and consumption. Even the most successful open-source communities have encountered obstacles associated with building and maintaining large repositories of content. While some of these hurdles are technical in nature, others are more systemic, pertaining to licensing, attribution, and distribution. Lack of copyright enforcement has led to the exploitation of OER content authors whereby content providers charge students for the use of materials that were intended to be freely accessible.
The number of faculty who are “very aware” or “aware” of OER and Creative Commons licensing rose to 31 percent in 2018-19, up from 17 percent in 2014-15. At the current rate of increase, it would take another five years before a majority of teaching faculty become “very aware” or “aware” of OER.7
We believe that recent developments in blockchain technology have the potential to overcome issues with open access content repositories and further accelerate OER awareness and adoption. Our decentralized application (dApp) is designed to underpin a library of STEM educational content that seamlessly connects content creators and learners while simultaneously ensuring that IP consumption follows the creator’s desired licensing structure, all the while providing transparent accounting for every transaction. This will disrupt the current system of exploitation.
Some of our expected customers are already using materials from the library of STEM educational content that our dApp aims to supplant. These include
--academic institutions, of which there are more than 1070 in the U.S. and Canada7 and
--content management systems (CMS) and other providers of STEM educational content.
Our platform will open up a new virtual economy for educators, students, and the content distributors who facilitate interactions with educational content. Providers using our dApp will benefit by their ability to more easily identify and contract content authors and by having access to fresh content. This will allow them to enhance their course offerings and thus expand their own customer base.
Our dApp has the potential to transform how STEM content authors are compensated, recognized and share their content. Our dApp marketplace will increase the options for creator funding and royalties. We are long-term open-source community contributors, and we are committed to donating a portion of our revenue stream coming from sub-licensing this open content directly back to The WeBWorK Project7 (TWP). These donations support code camps, authoring workshops and other community events.
Students will benefit from low-cost access to a wide variety of high-quality STEM content authored by subject matter experts. Students will also retain ownership and control of the immutable data produced during their interaction with course content.
The availability of filterable, public, anonymized data and secure, private, individual records will prove invaluable for researchers and students alike. If successful, our project has the potential to not only disrupt the current STEM education space, but also the economy surrounding other types of IP assets.
Our smart contracts will allow content authors to create the building blocks for course curricula which will have perfect traceability from creation through to consumption. Smart contracts embedded within individual assets will make it possible for authors to receive proper attribution and compensation, regardless of the means through which it is consumed. Compensation has the potential to take several forms which we anticipate will serve to incentivize work and open up the possibility of a marketplace whereby content experts can be contracted to create fresh materials. On the flip side, content consumers will also have their interactions recorded, allowing them access to their history at any point in time, independent of their status with a particular content provider.
Several components of our system’s modular framework are already in various stages of development. The WeBWorK content renderer has already been released. Our team is currently in development on the web 2.0 library database and UI, which will transition from database to dApp during the course of our project. And initial integration with CMS is currently underway with several providers. The dApp itself is currently in the design stage and we hope to begin development with your support.
3 months:
--Develop and deploy smart contracts
--Migrate existing 50,000+ assets onto the blockchain
--Integrate existing Content Management System with dApp
6 months: ready for pilot, hit performance and load benchmarks
--Optimization of round-trip performance. We are introducing additional tasks into the request-render-response cycle, and it is imperative that we minimize their impact on response latency.
--Operating at scale. Product launch!! Partners will begin using dApp.
12 months: optimizations and internal economy
--Economic modeling. Value entering our economy is measured differently than our expected compensation structure. How do we navigate between value-per-user and value-per use?
Our IP counsel, the firm of Wolf Greenfield, will support this project by 1) reviewing the structure for our sub-licensing model so as to ensure completeness and legality and 2) guiding us in writing a provisional patent application for our dApp. This project has never been funded.
Budget:
--Pay founders for 6 months to allow them to work on the project: 6 months x $4,000 x 2 = $48,000
--Server costs and other technical infrastructure = $2,000
--Pay for freelance developers - 250 hours @$100/hr = $25,000
Total: $75,000
Sources:
1. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-368
3. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/
4. https://creativecommons.org/
5. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/open-textbook-pilot/
7. http://openedgroup.org/review