📚 Distributed Education Networks: A Solution to Higher Education?

7 Jul

Setting the Scene

Our modern education systems are anything but modern.

Instead of being designed to educate the person as a whole, to help them learn for and about themselves, the underlying aim is to simply feed the national economy.

What is valued has been increasingly characterised by career-oriented technical knowledge, a metric examined through the standardisation of curriculum. No value is placed on how a student understands questions of meaning, value, and purpose.

Beyond just the pitfalls of our current education system, the future of education has become increasingly uncertain with technological innovations rendering aspects of our system obsolete.

Recently, social media news feeds have become the primary source of information for many students. This hyper-stimulating environment, driven by for-profit-driven algorithms, is not educational by any stretch.

Here is the concern:

This is the start of a trend in which education becomes distributed through online AI-powered platforms that teach millions of students the same thing in the same way on the same screen for hours a day, collecting their data through attention-grabbing content.

The Scape - A Distributed Education Network

Imagine a future in which a peer-to-peer network enables pop-up workshops for a new higher education model within one's local community.

These workshops are self-organised within the community with students and teachers all having accounts on the network to organise and sign up for workshops.

Instead of being organised by a centralised institution, these pop-up workshops respond to the skill and knowledge of local teachers, the interests of students and the needs of the local community.

Despite the platform’s digital nature, it’s designed to encourage in-person workshop learning experiences.

Now, let us consider Jacob’s experience using this network.

Jacob, an 18-year-old who has recently embarked on his first month of higher education, has signed up for this decentralised education network with a strong initial interest in learning more about permaculture.

By signing up to the network, he receives 50 blockchain tokens, each being able to be exchanged for a workshop and needing to use them all to complete his higher education. He signs onto his account and finds 4 other kids who have signed up for a local offering for a permaculture workshop in the nearby park.

It reads:

A 3-week course consisting of a weekly workshop teaching design and natural building in week 1, gardening and soil techniques in week 2, with a final workshop for designing a permaculture design for a potential project with a local farmer.

Introductory workshop: No prerequisite experience is necessary

Workshop Categories: Ag (Agriculture), De (Design), Ec (Ecology)

Value: 3 Tokens.

Teacher: Elizabeth Bell, 236 Previous Workshops, Read the profile here

Jacob exchanges his 3 tokens and, come the afternoon, heads down to the local park for his first workshop.

The educatory principles of these workshops are in line with the human-based science of learning, with 4 key principles for education including:

Interpersonal relationships
Emotional connection
Embodiment
Dynamically interactive hands-on experience

From the start, Jacob is encouraged to apply these permaculture principles to existing local problems for his final project.

Another teacher notices the workshop on the online time-sharing schedule and decides to join the following week to form a trialogue workshop. With one teacher possessing a more agricultural background, and the other an ecological one, there is an interplay between their different specialities during the workshop, providing an interdisciplinary understanding of land management and permaculture.

The decentralised educational hub naturally self-organises with students coming together depending on their interests and availability.

The goal is to remove screens from the learning experience where possible. These immersive workshops move away from written examination by emphasising experience and learning through doing.

During Jacob’s 3-week course, Elizabeth makes available online material to help the students engage in out-of-workshop learning from home. She engages her students through the online platform on which topics or projects they would like to focus on, helping to co-create the curriculum for each future workshop.

Workshops become responsive to the needs of local stakeholders in the community. Local organisations and community leaders become part of this process by posting potentially useful projects on the education network to encourage local educators to respond to changing needs in the community as ever-evolving educational requirements are posted to the online education network.

For instance, Jacob had observed a recent influx of available permaculture workshops in his local area. His mother mentioned that this was likely due to the increase in investment by the council in the rainwater harvesting infrastructure and the local farm as a response to increasing food requirements. It turned out that the council made a post on the network suggesting that permaculture workshops were an increasingly valuable skill for employment in the area.

Central to the education network is a series of public spaces and hubs filled with libraries and publicly available technology available to students for working on peer-to-peer projects, or for simply teacher-led workshops. With minimal oversight from volunteers during the day, these public spaces largely run themselves.

This new model helps encourage peer-to-peer engagement in an age of pervasive technology, as well as creating a higher education system that adequately responds to social change. Access to education becomes one of abundance as opposed to scarcity, encouraging widespread learning and empowering intergenerational teaching within local communities.