Learning Tokens

Summary

Education is a lifelong need, and online learning is a vital resource that begs for improvement. Attrition and dropout rates are high, certification rates are low, and learning data is opaque, with centralized ownership and inefficient impact. Learners’ motivation and lack of interactivity are the main culprits.

Learning management systems control the flow of interactions to transmit knowledge and skills, but learner’s achievements remain locked in silos. Learners get certified after courses but do not own the record of their skill acquisition process. Matching tasks and skills through diplomas are insufficient to meet the rising demand for talent.

Data support

Education is a human right and a public good. The total number of individuals enrolled in a learning program is 1.8 billion in 2017, and 23 percent of the current global population is a student

Online learning is the fastest-growing market in the education industry, 900 % since 2020, with a worldwide compound annual growth rate of 9.1 % by 2026. In 2022, its market value was $100 billion, and for 2022, projected to be $687 billion by 2030. With participation, in 2020, 16.1 million learners in the U.S. and 9 out of 10 businesses providing online education to their employees. Other sources quote that worldwide, 49% of students have completed some online learning, and online learning improves employee performance by 15% to 25% .

However, the rates for MOOCs show average completion at 15%, dropout can go as high as 95%, certification is only 2%, and only 0.17% earned distinction certificates. The reasons? Lack of time, learners’ motivation, feelings of isolation and lack of interactivity, insufficient background knowledge and skills. Techniques to increase retention? Formal recognition of accomplishment, professional development, participation, and enhanced student and instructor interaction.

In 2015, digital diplomas debuted at MIT Media Lab with Blockcerts Wallet, and by 2024, revenue in the Professional Certificates Market is USD 6.04bn with 75.2m projected users by 2029. All of them validate the overall completion of courses, and none registers the sequential steps in the learning process.

Skill gaps and an inability to attract talent prevent industry transformation. A "Skills-first" approach to hiring and developing talent is needed to guarantee that the right skills and competencies are available for particular roles and tasks.

We propose a granular registry of the learning process gathered in skill profiles that learners can own. This evidence-based measurement can increase learners' motivation and improve the efficiency of instruction.

Skills are taught and learned through the transmission of knowledge. We tokenize this real-world asset as a unique representation of value recorded in a blockchain.

Learning Tokens recognize, at a granular level,  units of competency and five sequential actions to transmit them. An instructor conveys a unit of competency. A learner acquires it. The instructor assesses such acquisition. The learner responds correctly to this evaluation. The instructor awards the learner formal recognition of competence. A token registers the value of acquiring knowledge.

This granularity allows for measuring assessments in detail, describing the logic of their aggregations throughout curricula, interweaving individual learning paths, and assembling skill profiles for life.

Learning Tokens is Lab at Hyperledger in The Linux Foundation. In the past two years, it has used the Token Taxonomy Framework of the InterWork Alliance, an initiative of the Global Blockchain Business Council, to define tokenization with an open-source meta-model for digital assets.

Our goal is simple and modest: to provide a granular measuring tool for any educational program without interfering with their academic freedom or operating ways.

Tokenization can help by focusing on results and long-term impacts, being transparent and open, and supporting ownership and leadership of those who benefit from it.

Please see an example of MITx course “Business Impact Planning for Social Enterprises?”  with Learning Tokens.

Our solution serves all stakeholders of the whole lifecycle of Learning Tokens:  granters, holders, verifiers, market actors, and governance institutions. (See Fig.13 at README )

Granters are Institutions, Instructors, and Courses that need trustful, transparent, and decentralized certificates of competence. Holders are Learners who need ownership of their learning process records and certificates. Verifiers are potential Employers, Partners, Investors, and Clients needing trustful certification of competence. Market actors are potential beneficiaries of skill profiles for recruiting talent. Governance Institutions are the authorities that regulate this lifecycle of educational experiences.

The solution impacts their lives through granular evidence-based measurement of competencies that they currently do not have.

Units of competency are consensually agreed statements of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values required for effective performance in a particular function. Instructors define units of competence in a course or a training program that transmits and certifies them. Lessons might convey multiple units of competency, and diverse assessments might confirm the efficacy of an educational strategy.

Four measurements assess learning: assistance to lessons, the score of responses to tests and tasks, engagement in class, and the feedback learners give for instructors' performance.

Four Tokens can attest to such assessments and become our currency of expertise.

1. Attendance Token for Learners.

2. Score Token for Learners.

3. Help Token for Learners.

4. Score Token for Instructors.

For institutions –and instructors– such instruments can complement their definition of strategic goals and the evaluation of their methods, enhancing their assessment and grading policies with standardized, detailed indicators without interfering with their educational ecosystems.

Learners can own and control the privacy of their development data with a skills wallet or digital curriculum management tool to organize, keep track of, and publicize verifiable credentials for their educational achievements.

For two years, we have conducted a Hyperledger Lab as a Joint Project of the Hyperledger Foundation at The Linux Foundation and the Global Blockchain Business Council, GBBC.

Our Team members understand the learning ecosystem from their roles as mentors and mentees of the Linux Foundation, from our work in global standards, sustainability, and research, and our understanding and maintaining the Token Taxonomy Framework, TTF, of InterWork Alliance at GBBC.

We listen to our communities, know the tools to develop open-source blockchain applications, and understand the requirements to comply with standards and governance.

We have developed a Proof of Concept with the World Calisthenics Organization. Next June, our Hyperledger 2024 Mentorship Program shall begin using Learning Tokens for community building with our 107,172 members across 186 Meetups worldwide.

Our Team Lead is a Linux Foundation Mentor, Founding Member of Hyperledger Latinoamerica Regional Chapter (see YouTube Channel) and GBBC Ambassador. Our two mentees have graduated from Linux Foundation Mentorships, and one is now a Mentor himself. The GBBC participants are the Director of Research in charge of the Global Global Standards Mapping Initiative and the Director of Technical Programs and Head of InterWork Alliance responsible of the Token Taxonomy Framework.

Together, we share strong leadership skills, enthusiastic engagement in community development, impactful global standards mapping initiatives, extensive experience navigating startup environments, and a passion for tackling challenges and driving results.

Our GitHub repository includes a document that explores educational markets, their learning principles and environments, the importance of skill-based learning, and the relevance of evaluation and certification. It looks into the market roles of institutions, instructors, and courses - with their content, assessments, scoring guides, and certificates - as well as learners, verifiers, and standard bodies. Shows how scoring guides can be oracles for four classes of tokens that granular register the learning process. Look into its application for educational programs and its potential alignment with educational market governance. 

There is a complete design of the life cycle of Learning Tokens with stakeholders, their interactions, and the components necessary for creating, transferring, holding, proving, and interchanging tokens, the structure for the Registry of Trust, and the fundamentals for a Governance Working Group.

We have defined four Token formulas with their complete definitions, specifications, and artifacts in compliance with the Token Taxonomy Framework standards. They are now in their open-source repository of tokens.

We deployed a blockchain and smart contracts with Hyperledger Besu, and an initial interface has been implemented for a prototype with the World Calisthenic Organization, as shown in the article Technical Overview Of Pilot Project With WCO Using Hyperledger Learning Token.

To scale up this powerful open-source tool, we propose Learning Tokens as a Service, an easy way to integrate its use into any online learning platform or in-person education event.

MIT Solve can help us evolve this project into a non-profit product that promotes an ecosystem of improved learning experiences.

We need advice, coaching, and networking. We want to continue our connection with the MIT Digital Credentials Consortium and learn from the original experience of Blockcerts.

All digital diplomas validate the completion of courses without providing a granular measurement of personal achievements or giving ownership and control of such learning data to learners.

Our evidence-based learning measurement responds to a standard open-source tokenization framework that becomes a currency of expertise for instructors, learners, employers, partners, and investors and is relevant for a potential market that supports collective learning.

Three of our four tokens are Non-Fungible and given to the individual learners who earn them. These three are Attendance Tokens, Score Tokens for Learners, and Score Tokens for Instructors. The Help Token is fungible and given to anyone who assists others in learning. This Token can promote rewards to reinforce communities of learning.

It is a simple solution applicable to any online learning platform or in-person educational events without interfering with their educational strategies and operational resources.

We are proposing a solution that will help tokenize the learning experience of every granular achievement of each learner through their learning journey. 

Every day, education is more open-source and facilitates learning, making it difficult, on the other hand, to justify abilities when the market demands more specialized and skilled people, especially in new technology roles. There is an expected $8.5 Trillion Talent Shortage by 2030, and more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there are not enough skilled people to take them.

Our ecosystem provides an open-source tokenization framework to help measure learning achievement as a token standard for global acceptance.

We are working on easy adoption to enable any Learning Management Systems from any educational institution to adopt this technology.

This solution will ensure that each skilled tag is justified and guaranteed to reflect the understanding level of learners. Fields of knowledge are standard CIP Codes from the Classification of Instructional Programs created by the National Center for Educational Statistics of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. Skills come from the World Economic Forum Reskilling Revolution Interactive Tools Global Skills Taxonomy and Education 4.0.

This solution will make data lakes of learning experiences, which will help to discover insights about the demand and supply of skills.

This solution will create a marketplace of skill inventories for all learners to match skills and roles. It will also help to give meritorious scholarships and guide everyone about opportunities and specialization.

It will unite communities of similar interests and contribute to their collective learning. 

Information flows are our leverage point for educational system change.

Granular measurements of learning experience gathered automatically from Learning Management System Platforms according to the Instructor Scoring Guides are our system inputs.

Outputs are feedback to learners and instructors in the form of Tokens created in response to Scoring Guides instructions and transferred to skill profiles held in self-sovereign Skill Wallets.

The outcome shall be data-lakes of standardized learning achievements that focus on learning recovery in the short term and help us identify opportunities to intervene in the education system in the long term.

According to UNICEF, our short-term outcomes can be supporting a learning recovery program with a mix of evidence-based, contextually appropriate strategies, supporting the diagnosis of individual learning, offering catch-up learning at a scale, and opening up alternative learning pathways.

According to Donella Meadows, long-term outcomes could be the places to intervene in a system beyond the structure of information flows. Incentives, punishments, and constraints to advance the rules of the system. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize its structure. And the reviews of the goals of the educational system itself.

We expect to have an impact on the problem because we can support RAPID five actions for educational recovery and the four motivational variables related to MOOC completion.

For RAPID educational recovery, Learning Tokens can help to Reach every student, Assess learning levels regularly, Prioritize teaching the fundamentals, Increase the efficiency of instruction, and Develop psychosocial health and well-being.

Learning tokens can support the four motivational variables of goal orientation, self-efficacy, grit, and need for cognition. Provide goals to increase competence and performance goals to succeed with favorable assessments from others. Improve our belief to accomplish tasks. Support perseverance and passion for long-term goals. And ground the need for cognition.

The goal of Learning Tokens as a service is to standardize the education system, ensuring that everyone can gauge their achievements throughout their lifelong learning journey. We aspire to establish a supplement uniform template for educational platforms to adhere to, facilitating transparent evaluation and grading policies. This standardized approach will enrich the education ecosystem with a seamless registry of knowledge transmission between instructors and learners.

From meticulously tracking learner attendance to confirming the absorption of skills from instructor to learner and evaluating the efficacy of the instructor-learner interaction, our system ensures thorough monitoring. Learners receive engagement tokens to encourage collaboration and community-building among themselves.

Our impact goals encompass a heightened emphasis on education, individualized skill profiles for each learner, insights into skill demand and supply, increased engagement within the learning ecosystem, and support for personalized education to identify specialized skills. Additionally, we aim to provide advanced training to bolster higher education pursuits.

Key indicators to measure our progress are the size and breadth of metadata for tokens granted and the range of learning environments where it is applied.

How many institutions, instructors, courses, and learners have we served?

How many scoring guides have we helped instructors standardize? With what taxonomies for fields of knowledge, skills, and values? 

How many token issuances have we verified for what type of employers, partners, and investors?

How many skill profile requests have we provided? To whom? What are the rising trends in skill demands? What are the gaps in demand and supply?

What paths of learning are more frequent? What next steps to recommend to learners and instructors?

What market of rewards encourages personal advancement and collective learning?

Our Registry of Trust and our Governance Work Group set the rules for the life cycle of Learning Tokens and the boundaries of our data lakes. Instructors and learners shall carve deep valleys to deposit large quantities of data whose flow controls each participant.

In our solution, we leverage blockchain & tokenization. Our underlying blockchain technology keeps the registry of every interaction immutable in a shared ledger that facilitates the networking of stakeholders and expedites efficient automatization of transactions.

Since early history, eleven millennia ago, tokens represented the measurement of goods. Nowadays, as bits replace clay, digital tokens are unique representations of a value recorded in a distributed ledger or blockchain. Cryptography supports their ownership and transfer. Consensus builds the collective registry of transactions for a network of stakeholders. They cannot be forged, are traceable, and can become programmable negotiable instruments incorporating rights over our non-financial and immaterial assets.

Learning Tokens represent the value of –and rights over–  a real-world asset, the transmission of knowledge.

Our ecosystem is open for anyone to be an active node in the blockchain, increasing its robustness and the potential to provide a global standard. 

Online learning, on the other hand, benefits the planet. According to research, each student produces 85% fewer CO2 emissions because students and faculty no longer have to travel for lessons, and there is no need for energy consumption at campus facilities.

Six people. 

Two full-time staff

          Alfonso Govela Thomae

          Tanjin Alam

Two part-time staff

          Diana Barrero Zalles

          Jackson Ross

and two mentees

          Jose Marvin Henriquez

2024 mentee to be selected

Two years

Our requests for participation are open through public calls to know and register for the Hyperledger Mentorship Program. We follow The Linux Foundation Guidelines for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Learning Tokens are a foundational education infrastructure without a business model yet. Through its initial two years of work, we have worked with successful open-source calls for participation, mentorship, and institutional support.

We are applying to MIT Solve because your help is priceless. We now need a business model to launch a Software as a Service, a simple way to scale up and facilitate the use of this resource.

Learning Tokens provide value to many initiatives to progress on Sustainable Development Goal 4. For the Education Commission and the Learning Generation, investing in education for a changing world, we can help create pathways to mobilize strong evidence and analysis by engaging with instructors, learners, employers, policymakers, and researchers.

We can be one of the many digital tools for real-time data collection in education, supporting the functions of data collection, data analysis, and visualization, instrumental in the development of global indicators, as well as learning content delivery and assisting instructors in instructional practices.

Learning Tokens wants to be a SaaS, free for learners, sustained by services paid by granters, verifiers, and market users of tokens.

Affordable for granters such as communities of schools, colleges, universities, and any online learning or in-person events. Open to partnerships with corporate training. Linkable to self-learning platforms on the Internet.

Reasonably priced for verifiers of tokens such as employers, partners, investors, demand for reports of skills, and market exchange of tokens for collective learning.

We want to fund our work by selling products or services.

For learners, we want Learning Tokens free.

However, we are willing to explore an almost free - a penny for a token - that amounts to 1 USD per learner per course instead of the 150 USD to 200 USD certification costs, 441 USD cost for specialization, or the 960 USD costs for micromasters.

Other stakeholders pay for services to grant and verify tokens, produce market reports of skill supply, and exchange rewards for collective learning.

We could explore a reasonable fee for skill-related services to reduce costs for recruitment, up to 4,700 USD per hire, or the expense of losing someone on a team or paying the price for lost candidates to competition.

Payments could be,

• subscriptions for base services,

• payment plans for different ranges of token issuance and transference,

• fee for token verification and

• fee for responding to specific market requests for skill profiles.