It’s no secret that the education system is in desperate need of innovation and reform. From an anecdotal standpoint, most people have family, friends, or colleagues who at least have doubts about the efficacy and benefits of higher education specifically. We see questions in major magazines and news sites like “Is a college degree still worth it?”, “Should you still go to college?”, and “Do you have to have a degree to get a good job?”. These questions are symptoms of the mistrust and jaded conceptions people have about the return students get on their educational experience. Whether institutions and their stakeholders want to discuss ROI is irrelevant. If the students are talking about it, it’s important to consider. The current status of education as a slow, hulking, and innovation-starved machine has left it stranded in the ditch of “doing what we’ve always done.” Educators want to change education, but everyone has different opinions on how to do it, how much to do it, and when.

Three Big Problems

While there are a myriad of issues facing education today, I believe there are 3 glaring issues that higher education must tackle, before the tertiary issues can be examined. These are issues that the project I am a part of, Hedgefox.io, is trying to solve. We’ve made it our goal to directly impact these issues and make it a part of our purpose to tackle these first and foremost.

Student Debt

The first is student debt, which continues to rise along with the cost of tuition. Thanks to guaranteed students loans from the department of education, institutions are not incentivized to keep costs low when they have government-backed money being poured in through students taking out educational loans. The average bachelors student can expect to graduate with around $36,000 dollars in student debt. And while this may not seem like much, when you consider that the amount borrowed almost doubles for minority demographics, you can see why students are starting to question the value of their education, especially when there are many more hoops to jump through for little career gain vs not attending college. What if students didn’t have to take on debt at all?

Accreditation

The current system of accreditation works a lot like a social club or think tank. In order to become an accredited school or program, you must abide by standards set by the accrediting body - who, by the way, is made up of other universities and colleges who could potentially see any innovation as a threat and thus, deny your accreditation. This system is incredibly self-serving. Not only does it stifle new ideas in higher education structures, but it also has major impacts on students downstream. If you’ve ever tried to transfer credits, apply for scholarships, or apply for high-paying jobs, you know how frustrating it can be to navigate the accreditation landscape - it seems that almost everything hinges on accreditation rather than the actual instructional quality and competency of the graduating students. Accreditation was once meant for assuring students of rigor and quality, but has since become a weapon for silencing ideas, generating bureaucracy, and stifling innovation. What if accreditation was open, crowdsourced, and autonomous?

Consolidated Knowledge Silos

Speaking of open, the current education system is just now starting to realize the value of not playing cards so close to the chest. Through open educational resources (OER), institutions have been able to drastically reduce the cost of textbooks years over year for the past 4 years or so. They have been able to distribute and decentralize textbook creation simply by sharing knowledge and peer-reviewing it on a worldwide basis. And this is a good start! But there’s more that can be done. I believe that if someone wants to learn something, they should be able to, regardless of location, socioeconomic status, degree, or time spent in school. What do I mean by this? Think about the Reformation (remember Martin Luther’s 95 Theses?). The church had total control over what people learned from the Christian scriptures and how they learned it. With some willing translators and the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, suddenly everyone had the ability to read and learn for themselves. The same can be true of education. Will there be a need for colleges and universities as we know them today? I think so, but only in the same way we need churches today - as guideposts and communities, rather than arbiters and overseers of truth.

A Cornerstone for Decentralized Education

These problems cause I and some colleagues of mine to think deeply about how the crypto economy is uniquely positioned and able to help change education for the better. We have tools now that we’ve never had before thanks to blockchain technology. From our conversations came the idea for a project called Hedgefox. Hedgefox is a very early stage project seeking to help individuals and institutions rethink education at every level. Our focus is currently on building an MVP for a mobile-first dapp that pays its users to learn, create educational content, and peer review content. We have three main goals for the project which are to eliminate student debt, provide universal and verifiably credentialing, and to advance open education by reducing traditional academic knowledge silos. Hedgefox is able to achieve this through a unique tokenomics model that utilizes DeFi to pay its users based on their completion of work on the platform and being rewarded with unique NFT certificates that are personalized and immutable. Combine these facets with eventual staking and revenue sharing, education can become not only profitable for everyone involved, but also can help to provide quality education to anyone with the incentive to participate regardless of location, socioeconomic status, political affiliation, religion, gender, race, or disability.

Join us. We have more Mirror articles coming that discuss specifics about the project and how we hope to achieve our lofty goals. We’re building the dapp right now and would love for you to participate by joining our Discord, following us on Twitter, visiting our Website, and reading our Whitepaper!

That was the question that sparked the idea for Hedgefox over a year ago now. While the idea initially created more questions than it answered, the purpose and feasibility of Hedgefox eventually came into sharp focus. I would like to present you with a fictional short story to illustrate the purpose and outcomes that Hedgefox is striving for.

Louisa's family is very poor and although she would like to become the first person in her family to go to college, due to financial and social burdens, she is unable to do so. She applied for some scholarships, but did not win and took on some student loans to attend a few night classes at her local community college, but when she was ready to transfer her credits to another online school, she found out half of them would not transfer and she would need to take the classes over. Discouraged, she went back to working at a local fast-food restaurant in order to meet her student loan obligations. Armed with only a cell-phone, she tries to take a few free online courses to increase her skills so that she can get a well-paying job doing something she likes. Unfortunately, employers that she has been applying to want to see some actual, verified credentials of some kind. She hunts through the web for anything that can help her obtain a qualified credential for free and finally stumbles upon something called Hedgefox.

Hedgefox claims to be able to pay you for learning. Louisa is intrigued but highly skeptical. She makes an account and quickly sees a few "creds" that interest her. She starts one and is shocked to find that the cred is taught by a professor from the public university near her hometown! The cred is filled with links, videos, podcast episodes, and a whole host of other media from all over the internet. There's even a section where other participants are posting their own creative writing! It reads almost like a social media website. Louisa finishes the short little cred and notices that she's been awarded some tokens of some kind. "Meh, that's kinda cool, but whatever." She goes on to complete 8 other fascinating creds about creative writing and notices that her "token balance" keeps rising. Finally, her curiosity gets the best of her and she taps on the little question mark beside the token balance. It shows she has earned the US dollar equivalent of $20 in HFOX tokens just from sitting down for an hour and learning about creative writing as if it were her social media feed.

After completing another 10 creds, Louisa is awarded some kind of certificate NFT for creative writing? "No idea what that is, but cool I guess?". A few days pass and Louisa gets a notification from Hedgefox that an employer would like to speak to her. Not sure what to think, she opens the message which reads: "Louisa, we noticed that you obtained a Creative Writing Certificate on Hedgefox and we wanted you to know we have a position open for content writer on our blog page! We'd love for you to apply!". Well, at this point Louisa is floored. She immediately applies to the job and after a few days receives a message that she's has been hired! Her starting pay will be $50k per year with medical, dental, retirement, and PTO benefits. Louisa breaks down and cries. For the first time in her life, she's caught a break... finally.

After a few years in her new job and quite a few more creds completed just for fun, Louisa decides she wants to give back. She joins a local community homeless shelter and begins volunteering on the third Saturday of every month. She even uses her creative writing to document and publish the stories of some of the people she is serving. One Saturday evening, she casually checks Hedgefox like she usually does and notices a new NFT certificate has been added to her account. It's a "Prized Volunteer" certificate from the homeless shelter! "Unbelievable!" She's building a whole resume profile right in Hedgefox. The following Monday, her boss calls her to congratulate her on the volunteer certificate and sends her a thoughtful gift in the mail.

Never did Louisa imagine that not only could she learn the skills she needed, but that she would be paid to do it, be able to build her own skillset based on her interests, and be connected to an employer who would verify and value her skills. What she once saw as a long and expensive road to doing what she loved and giving back to others turned out to be a profitable and exciting journey that she was empowered to undertake. She wanted more. She wanted to grow, and gain, and give generously. Her family was changed and without being too exaggerative - it altered the trajectory of her life.

Thank You

Thank you for spending your valuable time reading this story. We will be posting more articles here to Mirror over the next 4 weeks with more details leading up to our crowdfund, but you can find all the specifics right now in our whitepaper below.

We are building Hedgefox right now and would love for you to be a part.

https://twitter.com/hedgefoxio

https://docs.hedgefox.io/

https://discord.gg/fEJQzMfYs2