[DAO:a979c03] Decentraland University Live Teaching Platform

Governance
1

by 0xe5cf1bb88a59f9fc609689c681d1d14bfe7ce73a (James)

Should the following $140,000 grant in the Platform category be approved?

Abstract

Decentraland is a great platform for running live events, and the most important element of education is live teaching. There is no substitute for real time interaction between teacher and students.

While video platforms like Zoom provide an excellent face to face experience, these types of meeting platforms only work with 2D content. We will an opportunity for teachers to present 3d content and Decentraland University District is a great place to showcase this by having it equip its venues with great teaching functionality.

The goal of this initiative is to remove the barrier to entry for those wishing to use Decentraland for live coaching/training/education.

Grant size

140,000 USD in DAI

Project duration

4 months

Beneficiary address

0xa560bF3CfA1991116d6B836960644818a0f15DC1

Email address

james@decentraland.university

Description

This grant application is to fund the creation of an open source live presenting/coaching facility which will serve the following groups:

1/ Decentraland University Original Contributors who have the right to teach in the district.
2/ The wider Decentraland Community who wish to teach live classes on LAND in Genesis City, or in DCL Worlds.
3/ Decentraland University and other organisations who wish to deliver this functionality to clients.

It covers the creation of:

*An NPM package compatible with SDK7 which developers can use to bring this functionality into their own scenes.
*A server abstraction with a basic control server interface for running classes with the shipped reference test server.
*A DCLUClassRegister smart contract which will provide the core class management storage and enrolment features.
*An open source dApp which will allow LAND Operators and teachers to access admin features which are dependent on, or backed by the DCLUClassRegister smart control.
*A minimal test server which also serves as a reference server implementation.
*1 parcel Genesis City scene template with a fully decentralised implementation which fully demonstrates all of the features made available by the library. This will allow developers to easily copy/paste the functionality to their scene to allow teaching in a single realm without any additional dependencies.
*1 parcel Genesis scene template project with a centralised implementation based on the reference test server. This will allow people to easily copy/paste the functionality to their scene to allow teaching across multiple realms with the requirement that they will need to host either the provided reference test server, or their own more advanced server implementation.
*1 parcel DCL Worlds template with a fully decentralised implementation which fully demonstrates all of the features made available by the library.
*Comprehensive Documentation including the server specification so that developers could integrate the front end features with new or existing back end.
*An open source community venue in Decentraland University provided for one 1 year equipped with the peer to peer version of the functionality. Classroom Admin of this venue can be delegated to the DAO which can then control who has Teaching rights on the LAND. This will enable a number of community elected teachers to deliver content. (Note that if the DAO desires, we are willing for a trusted entity to hold the LAND on which the community venue resides in ESCROW for the period)

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JamesA is one of the early adopters of Decentraland having co-founded the Decentraland University district (and others) in 2017. In 2020 launched some basic live teaching functionality which he demonstrated to the then community.
Earlier in his 25 year career in software development, he spent a decade working in e-learning, which included the creation of a virtual classroom training application that was used in the automotive sector by multiple car manufacturers.

Roadmap and milestones

Month 1 Month 2 Month 3 Month 4
Live Class NPM Library Design + Impl Impl QA Iterate / QA
Reference test server Design Impl QA
SDK Server abstraction Design Impl QA
DCLUClassRegister contract, auditing, testing Implementation Audit Deploy
dApp built with React w/ Alchemy Design Impl QA
Scene template 1 Design Impl QA
Scene template 2 Design Impl QA
Worlds Scene template Design Impl QA
Example Class Content Impl QA
Documentation Impl Impl Impl Impl
Creation of Community Venue Impl QA

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

2

Awesome Proposal! Good luck!

3

I love this proposal. Voted Yes!

I want to know also if the landowners or tenants need to spend any $$ after the final product.
Do we need to spend $$ for servers, bandwidths, or anything?
Or everything here is a code so no additional cost to operate is needed?

4

Hey @akasya.eth great question!
The answer is no, landowners do not need to spent money on servers or anything.

There are 3 templates/solutions provided, and 2 of them use the built in peer to peer communications built into DCL, so there is no need to run any server. With the restriction being that classes take place in a single realm or a single DCL World.

There is a 3rd template, and the reference server which enables larger scale usage which could scale to any size by use of servers.

In short classes of up to 100 people at no cost to Landowners / Tennants :slight_smile:
(And a reference server implementation for more than 100 people is provided as part of this, so devs could get this up and running for more than 100 people with only their own server hosting costs)

Further to the above, This first implementation would use Mainnet for storage and for checking permission to teach when setting up the class. So there would be a couple of small Ethereum transactions that would need to be executed to setup the class in the first place, and then to start the class. If it is a private class then that would also mean gas to enrol students.
Given LAND Is on Mainnet this feels the best way to get this started. But we could look at building L2 support for a gas-less teaching experience in a later version.

1 Like
5

That’s awesome!
Thank you for your perfect insights.

Please pursue this vision as metaverse experience will continue to evolve.
Once your project is launched, Decentraland will continue to be the top metaverse project.
Anyway, are there any shortcuts to do the L2 first before the L1 hahaha

6

Voted yes on this for the idea but i can’t seem to be able to visualize how the process will be. Could you elaborate on how, say a teacher, wants to use this platform to engage with the students? Who does the teacher needs to approach? What does the teacher needs to do? Do they require any technical knowledge to operate this or this is more like a “plug and play” and ready to go? Do elaborate to provide a better understanding.

7

Hey @MetaRyuk

There will be a community venue, which we will provide orchestrate control through the DAO. That will allow teachers to use this without LAND or having to setup a DCL World.

For less technical people who own LAND, or have a DCL World. there is the templates we will provide so anybody with the will can copy and paste their way to having the capability on the LAND.

We will provide a dApp which will allow teachers to set this up, and that will need either coordination re. the community venue, or collaboration with the LAND owner or Worlds creator.

Developers will be able to look at the templates to see how they are implemented to incorporate the functionality into their own scenes.

I think this is a pretty comprehensive set of use cases. Success in the community venue will allow future initiatives to create other facilities for teachers. That will all be open source so ultimately anybody could clone that and host it anywhere in DCL.

Does this answer your question? Happy to elaborate further if not…

8

This is exciting to see something finally being talked about in the U District! The University was one of the first areas in DCL I watched being built with the updates on YouTube. I bought land nearby because I believed in the potential of distance learning (before Covid crushed my little heart on that topic :sweat_smile: ) As a teacher myself, it really sold me on the idea of the potential of the Metaverse.

Will there be the capacity for current DCL users to teach courses here as well? I mean, I know most of us could find land to set up for some educational content, but it would be powerful if a lot of this was consolidated in one educational area. (I’m just thinking like a small parcel that we could all sign up for, like if I want to teach a drone class, so I sign up for Tuesdays at 2:00 or something)

There’s a lot to unpack with a grant like this, please let me know if you hold any AMA’s for the community, I’d love to listen in :slight_smile:

9

Hey @Canessa

Yes the Community venue outlined in the proposal will be in Decentraland University. That gives us a chance to pilot this in the context you refer to.

The ins and outs of how that will work will form part of the body of work, but for example we might say that for simplicity, a teacher is permitted using the admin dApp we will be providing to use the class for a UTC-centered 24 hour period (to keep scheduling / timezones etc simple), but the venue could have multiple classrooms (e.g. 4) so that there could be multiple things happening by multiple teachers each day. We will consult the community when we are making some of the choices re. The Community Venue in DCLU.

I´ll come if you do a drone class as in my life pre-Decentraland I used to build and fly FPV racing drones as my main hobby!

10

Just in terms of an AMA, we haven’t planned it but lets see how this forum progresses as to whether there are a lot of questions that need more detailed discussions. Always happy to jump onto a spaces or a discord chat and talk about it… but equally it’s nice if we can address everything in this forum so that its all there for others to digest in black and white

11

Thanks for the extra explanation, this is exciting! I need @Maryana or @Stoik to teach the drone class… they know way more than I do…and Stoik was kind enough to keep me out of prison when I asked him how to shut my elevation sensor off on my drone (Whooooops)

Getting the Part-107 would be a real use-case for teaching in the metaverse. I could see so many applications with teaching here. I wonder what other small certifications people could teach here and apply irl? (State Food Handlers permits, Adult care provider licensure, hell… drivers ed? Make a realistic drivers course and the student has to drive the car and if they don’t obey the rules of the road there’s instant feedback to prepare them for taking the test irl, for the food handlers permit the students are in a DCL kitchen and have to actually prepare the food and heat to the correct temperature and cool rapidly or they fail, they have to walk around the kitchen looking for real hazards, omg that could be used in every high school culinary class in our country. Instead of plopping the kids in front of a book they could log in, move their avatars around the Decentraland Kitchen and ACTUALLY be showing what they learned. Ahhhh, this is so exciting!!!). Ok, I’ll shut up now, you can tell I’m a former teacher and could go on and on about teaching :joy:

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BWAAAA I WANT TO MAKE A FOOD HANDLERS KITCHEN COURSE SO BAD NOW!!! :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

13

Voting YES since Part 107 lessons can by taught utilizing this, as mentioned by @Canessa :slight_smile:

In all seriousness, I can see this being a helpful tool for those who want to host and educate on higher education professional accreditation review courses (I.e. CPA, CFA, RN), in addition to metaverse related skills on someone’s own parcel.

I look forward for the NPM package to be released to hold some courses.

14

Hi. Could you explain these points?

  • Will you develop things as alone or a team?
  • Who will take responsibility for these contents?
  • Can I check any documents or a website of your past works?
15

Hey @ethcouple.eth
Thanks for your points.

  • Will you develop things as alone or a team?
    The proposal lists the line up who will be developing this. I am the team leader and designer of the solution.

  • Who will take responsibility for these contents?
    The proposal should cover this pretty well as the solution is both Decentralised and Open Source. But in addition to that we will steward the solution and indeed hope to build upon it.

  • Can I check any documents or a website of your past works?
    Probably the best bet is for you to see our live works. I’ve been active in DCL since 2017 and have been involved in a lot of projects.Just explore scenes in DCL University District. Probably the most relevant are the Dow Jones, Fidelity or some of the University projects from the past such as the Career Centre and the career fair we ran for Penn State University. The VR Academy which first showcased some really basic live teaching features, and Crypto College (which is due a rebirth btw what out for it, it used to be home of the weekly crypto social. Something we’d love to reinvigorate by making use of the solution we are going to develop here).

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Decentraland University Live Teaching Platform

This proposal is now in status: PASSED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 94% 10,235,597 VP (101 votes)
  • No 5% 616,234 VP (6 votes)
  • Abstain 1% 779 VP (6 votes)
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Decentraland University Live Teaching Platform

This proposal has been ENACTED by a DAO Committee Member (0xbef99f5f55cf7cdb3a70998c57061b7e1386a9b0)

Vesting Contract Addresses: 0xd097E1A4087D58D00af0746dF13d06511d8e6F41

18

The work for this grant is now complete. The work is open sourced at liveteach · GitHub where there are 5 repos. These has been forked by the DAO to the DAO Github as well.
We continue to work on this project and this video was recorded today which shows a teacher setting up and delivering some example content in a classroom in the Community Venue. The venue has 2 x Lecture Theatres and 2 classrooms and is deployed into Decentraland University district and is available for use (just DM us on Discord if you would like to use it).
We see this as phase 1 of building a viable live instructor led training capability to Decentraland and feel we have accomplished what we set out to do, and we are currently planning out what’s next for LiveTeach.

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M2lWXImJS4XR2EyBKPMM8hTduJTPsfhi/preview