What is edChain?
edChain is an open-sourced, decentralized library that allows the sharing of educational content across applications and organizations.
edChain Website (http://www.edchain.io)
Goals:
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Lower Cost: edChain provides a shared, repository for educators to publish content. No central servers are needed. Using encryption, content producers are provided full attribution and monetization across platforms and institutions. This increases revenues while reducing costs for students
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Universal Access: edChain standardizes and unites information across platforms. Students gain access to best of breed courses independent of the providers that they use. Content can be accessed via peer-to-peer connectivity obviating a need for broadband access
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Unlocking Value: Rather than rely on third parties, encryption enables content to stay connected to the educator providing a direct channel for attribution, analytics, and value. This allows educators to have more time to focus on creating the very best educational material and maximize learning
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Efficiency: The current global certification and grading systems lack uniformity. Moreover, multiple courses are offered on the very same topic without a standard across institutions. A shared approach will help create a system for global assessment while improving quality. It will also help track continuing education and career path to incentivize professional development
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Community Control: edChain is an open-source project with content and technology crowdsourced from the community. Community quality control ensures universal access to best of breed content so that students as a whole have access the highest quality materials. This makes educational material dynamic and relevant -- never obsolete
How it Works:
edChain uses the IPFS protocol for network connectivity and IPLD for storage. Content metatags ensure full attribution to the content creator, together with discovery and search, while IPLD data model maintains flexibility for all data types which can be used for creating various components of a course. Initial course organization is handled through core descriptors from schema.org which can be adopted or replaced by course producers. The ethereum platform is used for smart contracts and payments.
Content
We are working on taking open source content on the web and putting it on the network. Initially we are trying to upload content from https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
Contributing
Would you like to contribute to our codebase ? We welcome all contributions, big or small. Before contributing please read the code of conduct. Please feel free to reach out to us for any questions!! We look forward to working with you. Contact: edchainio@gmail.com
RoadMap
For dicussing and suggesting features, please go to Projects
Getting Started
TODO: