Well, they have salaries or stipends already, generally. The universities offer the courses because people want to take them. This is more like giving school supplies - which has proven to be quite hard. You can get a million dollars for liquidity mining to attract farmers easier than you can get $500 to be the first, positive experience with crypto for a bunch of future lawyers and government employees.
If this budget size is retained, highly recommend using it to provide an educational package - lesson plans + tokens for playing around with governance and DeFi - to dozens of classes at quality institutions that already occur.
The amounts/scope just dont seem to fit but def am big on targeting unis. May be easier to get many small hackathons rather than large courses going, aswell as reach builders early on into the space through them actually contributing for rewards, clubs may be a good fit here vs courses. Maybe do like x OP per person for academics to give out for people to engage/del/vote with in the DAO or for staking/using OP.
āIf this budget size is retained, highly recommend using it to provide an educational package - lesson plans + tokens for playing around with governance and DeFi - to dozens of classes at quality institutions that already occur.ā
But that is exactly who is being targeted. Classes on Ethereum and Crypto that will do the above and will transact meaningful amounts. If yours does not, great. But thatās not really the audience here.
Also a <$1000 grant from Optimism is almost better not given. Itās so low it might actually look bad.
Disagree. We just helped someone get a micro grant like this and they will now have a wallet and a bridge as the sponsors and probably will not even be using Optimism, who was also approached but unable to make it work.
We arenāt advocating against large grants to collaborating academics across multiple institutions. Just that there is low hanging fruit that would be good to cover under this mission since itās conceptually the same - supporting educational outreach that onboards new users to the ecosystem
I really like the general idea but agree with some of the concerns some people raised.
I wouldnāt aim for a whole module built from scratch, but rather focus on educators already teaching Ethereum and DAO governance.
I believe paying educators directly can be tricky, since they shouldnāt be able to have personal gains from introducing a given topic in their curricula.
Instead, we could help fund workshops and meetups organized directly by students in blockchain clubs or connect with educators and offer them OP to reward / fund students.
Educators already working with Ethereum can give out OP to their students and have them transact on-chain, so they get hands-on experience with DeFI, DAOs and whatever the professors are teaching in their program.
IMHO best way to have immediate impact would be to have 5 regional teams managing a budget of 10k to fund students in as many universities as possible. Itās important that each team has strong connections with people teaching at universities in their region.
At 10/20usd per student, each team should be able to onboard 1000 people, provided they are able to find the educators willing to participate.
I can imagine this being a huge success in Argentina, really looking forward to hear from people in other parts of the world.
I mean, isnāt the point here that thereās already a big head start with respect to the curriculum? You have a few of the most prominent educators already signed on to this thing.
I donāt know how close people are to a lot of āblockchainā education but from what Iāve gathered itās like a parallel universe to our own. I think it would be immensely valuable to have a knowledge base for educators to tap into and some existing high-profile courses to offer what would in effect be a practicum through the offering of OP to participate in governanceāand give a more or less definitive playbook for others to use. This is such a layup Iām surprised people arenāt enthusiastic about this one.
Then again Iām also suprised people are enthusiastic about low-effort āeducational coursesā that can be sybilled with no real impact metrics, so maybe Iāve got the wrong expectations here.
I think people are anchoring too much on ālarge coursesā (ie for single instructuors) and not seeing ācontributable knowledge baseā. Suggest rereading the post here:
@Carlosjmelgar can you make some edits based on what has been suggested so far?
@drnick@postpolar could you give a rough idea of the likely funding needs of what youāre generally suggesting here? What would 20k per course be spent on? Naturally some would go toward the compilation of the general playbook.
I think delegates from university blockchain groups ought to weigh in here with perspective. @Juanbug_PGov@chaselb and anyone else?
Some context: Iām currently a 3rd year undergrad student at the University of Southern California (in the United States). I am also heavily involved in our student blockchain club, leading our governance team and also contributing in some of the organizational/admin stuff for the club. Tagging my co-lead @Sator here as well to give some thoughts (who is a masterās student).
Before I give my thoughts, do know that I am a bit biased. Classrooms have never been my preferred learning environment. We offer a few blockchain courses at my university (even offering a Blockchain minor, in the business department). I have avoided these courses, mostly because I think theyād be dissatisfying compared to self-study. So, that being said, I donāt think someone like me would be the target audience for an initiative like this. Rather, the purpose should be to get beginners and the curious interested into the world of blockchain/web3, and, to help establish Optimism as a trusted/favored brand for these new students. With that being said, probably hard to create a course dedicated to Optimism for that type of student (as mentioned earlier).
Some loose thoughts on going through student-led blockchain clubs instead:
Student-led instruction is hard, in large part due to, in my experience, the time-intensive nature of building a course from scratch.
Another thing to note about student-led instruction, though, is it is harder to guarantee reliability. I did a loose discussion series on governance last semester. First session, 20 people. Second session, 6 people. And often times I had to call off some of the sessions due to my own personal responsibilities. Students get busy, and class and work will often come before any extracurricular learning (even if incentives are involved).
With that being said, student-led blockchain clubs are easier to connect with, more flexible, and youāre more likely to find people with deep(er) interest or expertise in blockchain/web3.
Hopefully this perspective was useful. Itās hard for me to give anything more focused than this, as the discussion on this proposal seems scattered. Iām happy to answer any questions though, either here or offline.
Consisting of students from UPenn, this mission request is uniquely appealing to where we currently are. We think thereās certainly ways professors here and incorporate this into their teachings and think itās genuinely not going to be that hard. Teachers already teach courses using rather āunusedā chains, such as Algorand, and switching it some basic stuff to the OP stack would be easy to incorporate into each class.
Some concerns as a whole are that 20k or so wonāt really move the needle with anything from a program perspective level. We donāt see a way that such funding for a new course entirely would make its way into classrooms, but definitely a lecture or two. Certain classes have experimented with basic concepts like spinning up a wallet and submitting a few transactions. This could easily be done with this funding.
And finally to echo some of @chaselbās points, student led discussions, particularly through club events or alternative out of class lectures are hard and subject to low retention. Incentivizing them with some sort of grant allocation could definitely spur some activity but not sure if thatās the intended course of action also.
Iām an employee at OP Labs. Views shared here are my own.
I think this is an awesome idea! Having read through the feedback I understand there are challenges, but starting small and empowering students and blockchain orgs to engage in governance is a great initiative.
I think guest speakers + microgrants to students + delegation to blockchain clubs + grants for educators would be a fantastic start.
We also recognize the pros/cons and challenges for executions on this to work, but we believe itās worth putting up the request for future applications to tackle and address them. If executed well, the Open Source Syllabus mentioned in the proposal is going to be beneficial to improve the governance accessibility as a whole.
We are an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and believe this Request is ready to move to a vote.
Thanks for sharing. The linked proposal aims to create accredited courses. This proposal aims to integrate OP Governance into already existing courses teaching about Ethereum with theory and hands-on exercises. Based on my research, I believe this is easier to accomplish immediately.
