Going Down the Higher Ed and Web3 Rabbit hole
Going Down the Higher Ed and Web3 Rabbit hole
How Web3 Education Company Rabbithole.gg Implements Crypto Credentials
Over the past few weeks, I've been analyzing how web3 will impact higher education.
From a high level, two of the most interesting crypto applications in education are DAOs and crypto credentials.
Last week, I wrote about Blockchain@Columbia - a student organization that is organizing and fundraising by launching a DAO (called Lion DAO).
This week, I'm going further down the web3 meets education rabbit hole with rabbithole.gg.
Rabbithole.gg is a company that pays you in crypto to build on-chain credentials by learning and completing tasks.
I wrote about Balaji Srinivasan's view on crypto credentials. Balaji notes that “proof-of-skill” is the digitally native solution to higher education credentials. In this world, once you solve an established problem on a topic of interest, you are awarded a token on the blockchain that you can carry with you across the internet demonstrating your knowledge.
Rabbithole is bringing this idea to life by granting on-chain credentials in the form of quests, skills, and projects. I decided to test out the experience.
I was able to easily connect my MetaMask wallet to rabbithole.gg and get started with two skills that I had been wanting to learn: ENS naming and lending.
Rabbithole made it easy to navigate around the web3 ecosystem and introduce the most important topics in a user-friendly way.
From the education standpoint, I see Rabbithole as an onboarding ramp for projects that want to share more about how their project works. As a reward, they grant you their token. If you've ever used Coinbase Earn, it feels like a very similar experience.
As an early start to web3 meets education, this approach aligns incentives with crypto-enthusiasts wanting to learn more about web3 projects and creators of the projects wanting to onboard more users.
Going further, one could imagine any educational institution creating a native token and working with Rabbithole to award the native token to people who complete specific quests, skills, and projects that align with the educational goals of the institution (this appears to be the direction they are moving in with The Pathfinder Program).
As a thought experiment, MyMBA could create MyMBA Token and award a token for each essay that our Members complete throughout the MyMBA Membership.
Candidly, as a web3 novice, I'm not sure how much added benefit this would provide as our Members already create a proof of learning by publicly posting essays on Substack/Medium.
However, as web3 matures, it will be important to understand how to leverage web3 innovation to create better educational experiences.