(Photo by Honey Yanibel Minaya Cruz on Unsplash)
One of the key components of a Web3 world is decentralization. I’ve heard some people call it the “democratization of everything” — of software, of economies, of tech companies as we know them. It means putting power into the hands of the collective instead of the few.
Two main ideas come to my mind:
The folks at Transcend predict the shutdown of 70+ higher ed institutions this year. A top down structure in higher ed, one that rigidly sets degree mandates and often mediocrely trains students in fields such as computer science, is breaking. While so many edtech companies have tried to swoop in and be THE digital higher ed provider, I would argue that we’ll see a trend in the next few years of education-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that accredit and gain notable brand traction to have more power than some university degrees.
While we’re already seeing this with gold standard tech bootcamps (i.e. Hack Reactor) and alternative degrees (i.e. Degreed), the time is ripe for teachers and (often laid off) techies to unite and build collective organizations that train our modern workforce. I see Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha paving the way for new ways of organizing learning to happen.
One quick example: I’ve seen a lot of posts about Xoogler, a community for ex-Googlers to learn how to pivot their careers and start a business. One person or company does not hold the power to do this anymore… the collective learning of this community can educate much better than an accelerator or bootcamp.
Content is becoming decentralized too. We no longer accept that our liberal arts or other university degrees are enough. We supplement our degrees with what we should have learned — experiencing history, geography, and culture through our travels, leveraging bootcamps and one off courses, researching the effects of climate change on our local neighborhoods, staying up until 1am on Duolingo because our “4 years of [insert Euro-centric language here] in high school should’ve actually begun at age 5. Especially in higher ed, we’re seeing that experiential education and more modern content is what we want (and frankly need) for this complex world we live in.
What else am I missing that can be decentralized in education? And what does my network (especially teachers) think about DAOs? Really curious to know.
#web3 #DAOs #edtech #teachersunite #futureofeducation
