OS University : World’s First Distributed University
Revolutionizing the way 7 billion people develop academically and grow professionally.
What is OS.University?
OS University is about to roll out a first of its kind global higher education and professional development platform, based on the Ethereum blockchain, that will serve two main product functions:
- As a distributed database that enables Academia, learners, and businesses to record and verify educational and professional development credentials. This in turn will enable businesses to locate suitably qualified learners.
- As a global marketplace upon which high quality academic and L&D offerings will be made available, bought and sold with our EDU Token that will enable transactions and will be traded on cryptocurrency exchanges.
Starting with the integration of ~700 of world's top universities and 60+ million MOOC learners, our blockchain-based platform is introducing the concept of the "Distributed University" - one that enables transferability of knowledge & skills throughout institutional and national borders, reduces operational costs and opens up the access to high quality education and career development opportunities to hundreds of millions.
Why OS.University?
The connections between the counterparties shortened as follows: Business and Academy (B2A), Business and Learners (B2L), Learners and Academy (L2A).
L2B Smart Contract
The Open Source University blockchain is used as a distributed database to store learner certifications & acquired skills. Matching algorithm will handle big data calculations to connect businesses with the right candidates, optimizing recruitment costs, sourcing time and precision.
L2A Smart Contract
Learners have all their degree credits safely stored into the blockchain, allowing them to pick their career paths via course suggestion algorithm based on live data business needs and providing access to a flexible, fast track education model.
B2A Smart Contract
Allows businesses to access a new generation of Learning & Development marketplace, where learning content providers are filtered based on their disciplines catalog and academic rating, while payments are securely managed by smart contracts eliminating the need of middleman transaction processing.
"In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny."
Strategy
The whole education technology market spans into more than 40 discrete market segments, involving different parties. The Open Source University strategy is to involve all the parties into a distributed platform without any specific centralized dominant.The main parties which will benefit from the project are: Businesses, Students, and Academia.
1. Businesses
The source of business organizations are highly educated and motivated employees, which are turning ideas that seem to be impossible today, a reality tomorrow. Business will benefit from the Open Source University project by exploring and leveraging existing learning opportunities, organizing new learning pathways, shaping current demand of specialists and approaching the right candidates without any third party organization or job opening advertisements, saving time and money. One of the greatest benefits in the system is that part of the financial resources which every business will save in the process can be invested back to employees and academia, which will boost educational system and motivation of the learning and working force.
2. Students and Lifelong Learners
Students will benefit from the system, because all their achievements will instantly be saved in the blockchain and distributed to organizations that provide academic and professional development opportunities. All achievements of the learners will be stored and distributed over the blockchain to all working in the same area business organizations with respect of the privacy of every single learner. Smart Contracts will handle entire process of promoting the right learners to businesses over the Ethereum blockchain.
3. Academia
Nowadays e-learning content providers are making significant progress building high quality courses and alternative learning experiences, such as micro-masters and nano degrees, covering the practical applications of the skills every participant is going to gain. Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, among others, are some of the schools that you have at your fingertips through the EdX platform.Furthermore, the numbers below that highlight the success of some of the leading learning content providers, speak for the great need to support and advance the expansion of the sector for the good of society in general:
- Udacity started, based on a successful pilot online course in Stanford that attracted 160 000 students from more than 190 countries.
- Coursera has 24 million registered users signed up for its programs, and offered more than 2 000 online courses.
- Open edX is an open source platform that powers edX courses, which has more than 10 000 000 users. Through the platform, the percentage of students required to retake a particular course dropped from 41% under the traditional format to 9% for those taking the edX blended course offering.
- Udemy has over 7 million students & more than 30 000 courses as of 2016. Furthermore, there are more than 16 000 instructors and 80+ course-on-demand languages, excluding the "Udemy for Business" corporate training/learning portal.
OS.University invite members of the Academia into a distributed network of contributors, which contains impeccable and up to date information about the achievements and skills every learner gained along his/her road to excellence.
Architecture of the OSUni Core
- EDU Token: the ERC20 token used to trade courses and degrees
- OSUni Business Registry: handles information about company profiles & their degrees
- OSUni Academia Registry: handles information about Academia & their courses/degrees
- OSUni Learner Registry: handles information about students, progress & certification
- OSUni Interview: handles communication between businesses & learners
- OSUni Generosity: handles education related donations for courses and degrees.
Token Sale
The more the OS.UNIVERSITY marketplace scales in a global trillion-dollar market, the more its EDU token value will rise, hence the idea for an initial coin offering (ICO) through which tokens can be offered at a set price - sharing the cost, but also the benefits from launching such a global social innovation project.Open Source University token (EDU) is designed according the latest EIPs that has been adopted in the previous hard fork and these planned for immediate adoption expected to be included on the next hard fork. EDU tokens will be created during the presale and actual sale period in regards of how many are purchased and acquired during that periods.EDU tokens will be sold on two rounds - pre-sale and token sale. The six weeks pre-sale starts with the price of 1 ETH = 1,350 EDU. It ends when an amount of 2.6 million tokens is reached. The second part of the pre-sale will consist of 2.2 million tokens at the price of 1 ETH = 1,200 EDU. The later you get in, the higher the price of an EDU Token will be.
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