Cryptogecko's Steemit Crypto Academy Feedback

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Namaste Steem Family,

Firstly, this initiative taken by @steemitblog is a very appreciative one, and I am delighted by how enthusiastically people took part in the courses and the feedback posts, and shared their thoughts on the crypto academy experience with the community. As a member of the crypto academy, I have read a number of feedback posts written by other members, and I am amazed by how well they summarize their thoughts and ideas with the community.

I am Ravi Gohel, and I was a participant in the previous season (Season 4) but I did not manage to submit more than two or three weekly assignments. I mostly completed the introductory and beginners’ assignments and enjoyed working on them. Additionally, I am pleased to inform you that except for one introductory assignment, all of the other assignments were graded higher than 9 out of 10. I am therefore extremely pleased to have been able to work on the assignments that I liked and received good grades for them.

The weekly assignments had a good number of topics that I could have participated in, however, I was unable to find the time to complete them. Whenever I did had the time to work on the assignments, I failed to complete them on time, and most of the time I left them half-done. Nevertheless, the reason may have been a result of my approach to the assignments, as I prefer to write professionally only after performing proper research on the topic and performing an in-depth analysis of the questions.

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1. Introductory Fixed Assignment System: I was particularly impressed with the fixed introductory assignments made for complete beginners. While I do not consider myself a beginner, I appreciate the hard work put in the presentation, content, and articulation of tasks for absolute beginners, and they were really easy to understand and complete. I have a friend, who is working in the industry as a metallurgical engineer, he joined the academy and was ready to start working on the assignments, so he came to me asking about the criteria for participating in the academy and how the academy operates; he understood everything right away. Also, I did not have to teach him the assignments posted by professors as, except for a few, the majority of the assignments were written in simple language.

2. Level Structure of Weekly Assignments: This three-level division of weekly assignments is a fantastic way for users to know what they can do right away and what they can do once they have met a specific criteria. These levels assist people in understanding the courses in steps according to their current level of understanding. The beginner's course is the best starting point as it provides the ultimate exposure to the blockchain ecosystem, and after meeting the qualification criteria for the next level, the student can begin working on the assignments for that level.

3. Hard Working Professors: Apart from those points shared above, I believe that the professors who participated in rolling out the assignments every week put in a lot of effort, and I truly enjoyed reading their assignments whenever I had the opportunity.

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Through the seasons, I found that most of the assigned tasks did not inspire me to take part, despite the good rewards, since most of the assignments were related to trading or how one can profit from trading. However, I would like to offer my suggestions in a structured manner. I believe my readers will gain more benefit from my post if I present them in points.

1. Unorganized Structure of Course Syllabus: Despite the fact that the structure and content of the fixed introductory course were designed to prepare the students for the weekly assignments, as a regular reader of the course I could never understand the organization of the courses that were part of the weekly assignments. The academy professors shared a number of assignments on the subject of trading, but the basic concepts of the trading were never fully covered or were covered in parts, even if they attempted to cover them completely, they never did so in a systematic manner. The academy professors' primary task should be to ensure that students are guided through the topics, step-by-step, since they have eight weeks before the season ends.

2. Neglecting Wide Array of Blockchain Use Cases: The assignment posts could potentially have covered many aspects of blockchains, for example, play-to-earn games are popular today and people are hoarding NFTs to get on the trend and earn some good bucks while playing these games and from looking at some YouTube channels I can see that they are having fun while playing these games. The potential of niches such as play-to-earn and other such aspects of blockchain has been neglected by the professors and the academy professors have been mainly interested in teaching/making people trade on the exchanges, which was the main motivation for students to take the steem tokens away from the Steemit platform.

3. Stricter Rules: People have left the academy as a result of recent changes made to the academy's participation rules. The majority of those who left the academy were honest and regular users. I was surprised to see that the number of users actively posting in the crypto academy community was much lower than the number of users who had participated in previous seasons.

   Low user turnout may negatively affect the academy in the near future. Possibly, the @steemitblog team has something in mind that they are planning to do in order to encourage users to join other communities as well. I believe, however, that if users experience great engagement, and are rewarded for their participation in the crypto academy, then they may also start delegating and participating in other communities as well. This would be the path towards true decentralization.

4. Maintaining Consistency in Grading: In my opinion, taking the initiative to grade assignments posted by students is a great way to maintain user engagement and quality in the community of the academy. The idea of mentioning to students the areas in which they have done really well as well as the areas where they can improve on was incredibly appealing to me as a student. Although there was some constructive criticism in the marking scheme, the one thing that didn't seem to match up well was the inconsistent marking of the assignments. In some cases, professors grade assignments according to their own criteria, while in other cases, the grade is determined by the what questions were answered in the assignment.

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1. Decentralized Professors Selection Method: Several professors who are selected to teach on the academy courses have posted random courses for students to learn. Wouldn't it be great if we could make it a decentralized process where the students themselves select their professors. The crypto academy can ask professors to make a post or video where they share the season-long agenda of the courses they want to teach, and if more students back the syllabus shared by the professor, then the professor should be hired by the crypto academy.

2. Make Rules Optional: Decentralization is at its core about distributing power to the people, not making them follow rules by imposing certain criteria. There is no doubt that the #club5050, #club75, and #club100 criteria for participation in the academy courses are a very positive move. However, many people objected to the application of the forcible nature behind them. The people who participate with these tags must be given higher rewards than those who do not wish to participate with these tags, but the people who do not wish to use these tags must still be permitted to participate in the academy.

3. Improve Grading & Curation System: Professors are often busy with real-life activities, and sometimes the curator accounts do not vote on the graded assignments when they are busy. These inefficiencies demonstrate a lack of coordination between the academy owners and the volunteers. My suggestion is that we construct a tracking and analysis system where people are able to track the progress of the moderation process of their assignments. By doing this, students can rest assured that their assignments are being checked, verified, and moderated on time. In addition to this, the reposts will also be obsolete and redundancy will be removed from the academy.

4. Make Interaction on Assignments Mandatory: According to me, reading and absorbing information from the assignment course that the professor has posted is not sufficient. The other students who post their homework assignments can also have a unique assignment post that other students can benefit from as well because this way they can learn something from the other students that they may not have learned from the primary assignment post made by the professor. This can be achieved by rewarding the best interactions each week with small rewards.

5. Evaluate the responses made by the Professors: I believe that it would be beneficial to go over all comments made by the professors at the end of each season as a preemptive measure to make the process more decentralized and convenient for all participants. If this process is implemented, it will ensure that the professor does not give out random grades and that the professor is checking out each criterion for determining grades.

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Although the rewards have been slashed after the commencement of season 5, the rewards are still good for work that teaches students something of value. In a Learn-to-Earn program, the rewards or pay will never be low, but there are a few things that, if implemented, will greatly benefit the community at large.

1. Give Rewards to Grading Professor’s Comment: While professors who make assignments are rewarded well, by rewarding them for their grading comments, the professors might be motivated to check and grade the assignments made by students as soon as possible. The professors must be given some incentive to grade the assignments made by students quickly and fairly when they check and grade them. The Steem curator accounts which have unused vote value after curating other communities can be utilized for this matter.

2. Curate strategically: The Steem Curator accounts should curate the assignment posts strategically, this will maximize the rewards that can be distributed among the users of the academy efficiently. This can be done if the curators follow these points and maybe some other appropriate way can also be added on top of this:

   • Prioritize voting on posts based on the post-payout timing.
   • Prioritize voting on posts based on the grade obtained on the post.
   • Do not let the VP go below 90%

Apart from these points, I am not aware of anything else that can be suggested to optimize the rewarding process in order to better serve the needs of the community.

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Having learned that if people decide to work on a certain goal and if a certain amount of decentralized management can be achieved by the participants in the process, then as long as no individual has selfish needs, anything can be achieved. I have learned that it is possible to implement the learn-to-earn model in many other niches of education by incorporating the steem ecosystem into the teaching process. Education can be imparted to the whole human population in the best possible manner from our ecosystem, if we choose to follow our principles. This initiative of Steemit Team has enabled me to learn much about the possibilities that could arise.

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I believe that the academy has inspired me to explore several other crypto and blockchain projects which I was not aware of before, and I am glad I am learning about these topics earlier than many other people who live around me simply because I stumbled upon the possibility of knowing and exploring new things through the steemit crypto academy. As far as I'm concerned, I'm most interested in NFTs and Play-to-Earn games, and I think the next few months will be kind of crazy for the whole gaming industry, as more and more players are jumping on board and prepared for a new way of playing games, where players are the true owners of their games' assets. Therefore, I think this is the most interesting area of blockchains I have recently explored, one that I would be interested in exploring more in the months to come.

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As far as I can tell, I have not developed an interest in trading cryptocurrencies. Until now, I have only traded and exchanged currencies to obtain the currency I need, which I then used on another platform. Generally, I have traded my crypto coins for fiat currencies, but I have never considered trading cryptocurrency for profit. Furthermore, I do not intend to trade in the future for the purpose of making a profit; the only type of trade I enjoy making is swapping fiat for crypto or trading crypto for fiat currencies. I am convinced that coins should be held for a longer period of time.

I am participating in the #club100 because I have completed 3 months without withdrawing any steem rewards out of my wallet. A few days back I had made a single transaction that was done for the introductory assignment task number 1. Anybody can check the link to my task to verify the transaction history. The task demanded us to make small transaction on the #poloniex exchange. I have also attested an image showing the transactions from my wallet below.

_{Source: Cryptogecko's Steemit Wallet}

I had sent back all the steem from Poloniex exchange back to my steemit wallet to then power up everything.

Thank you for reading this post