Name of Project
Dabble Education
Proposal overview
One major reason the current education system is broken is that the system does not give students sufficient purpose to learn a specific skill. Assignments and exams attempt to simulate reality for the students and while this approach has value, it is also flawed in many ways. It uses fear as a motivator for student performance which forces students to be reactive instead of being proactive and taking initiative. Additionally, creativity is also stamped out of students as there is often a ‘correct answer’ that students need to conform to for grade equity. This stamping press of an education system is detrimental to long term career development, often resulting in dejected students at the end of their ‘official’ education journey in financial debt and without intrinsic motivation to learn.
And yet, there are countless models of learning that don’t conform to this mold. On-campus clubs thrive off students volunteering their time to learn and apply their professional skills, picking up new skills on the job is often a professional expectation and self-taught ‘geniuses’ are disrupting job markets. This is project based learning at its finest - where problems look for solutions instead of solutions/skills looking for a problem to be applied to.
We’re building a platform that inspires people to learn new skills by empowering them with mentorship and responsibility in real world projects that will tangibly demonstrate the impact of their work to themselves. We believe that people learn best in a way where they work backwards from the problem and we want to enable anyone to learn anything with this approach.
Dabble is a platform that brings back this purpose in students by having mentors collaborate with mentees to work together on a non-confidential project that the mentor is leading. Non-confidential projects are projects not walled behind an NDA agreement. This model has become increasingly popular recently with more bounty programs, open source and non-profit projects. Working with the mentor on such projects enables the mentee to learn first hand what the work involves and not only get paid for their contribution but also explore the role itself and quickly validate whether this industry/role is suitable for them. The mentee will then be informed when they make a decision around which career path they wish to pursue. Further education including university and bootcamps can then be optionally undertaken with purpose.
The impact of Dabble can be felt in a large number of target markets:
- Teenagers who are looking for a career path to pursue after high school. For most students, college would probably be their largest financial investment to date. It is also probably their largest self-elected time investment as they decide how they’re going to spend their next four years. And yet these dire investment decisions are often the direct result of social/parental influence without much validation done to ensure the rationality of such decisions.
- Displaced workers who are seeking to reskill in a new knowledge domain should be able to explore new fields to identify their field of interest before investing their limited time/money
- Companies wishing to upskill their employees should have methods to do so in an inspiring manner without learning skills they wouldn’t need for an extended amount of time.
Harmony has a number of open source projects and bounty programs on offer. We would like to pilot this platform with people interested in assisting with various aspects of Harmony on public projects from marketing to development. This will help improve the awareness of Harmony and can act as a gateway by which more of the community will learn how to participate actively and contribute to Harmony.
We have a concierge MVP, have onboarded 3 students onto a web project and are actively iterating on various strategies to make the end result a lasting learning experience for the mentees. I have received interest from a community manager who wishes to roll out the product to a web3 community of over 100 founders looking to find mentees to upskill and help with their projects.
Budget Allocation
- 60% - Platform development. Development of web and iOS platforms to maximize user traction.
- 30% - Hiring and consulting mentors to determine the right strategy to assist mentees
- 10% - NFT development to reward mentees/mentors who complete projects
Timeline Targets
- 22Q2 - Concierge MVP completes 2 projects. 5 mentors and 10 students onboarded.
- 22Q3 - MVP platform development finishes. 20 mentors and 50 students onboarded.
@essalacher invited me to post about this project on this forum.
