By
Andy Watson
March 16th, 2018
Knowledge.io tests teachers on their expertise as well as opens new revenue streams for students through “Knowledge Score” blockchain – a kind of so long awaited standardized qualification system.
Knowledge.io is using the principles behind blockchain tech to decentralize knowledge-sharing, giving both students and teachers a global arena to test the limits of human understanding.
The startup seeks to help students create alternative revenue streams while they learn to master a certain subject, meanwhile teachers can be more easily tested on their own expertise using the platform. This is all done through the use of the platform’s “Knowledge Score” blockchain – which uses objective metrics to both verify and reward people’s knowledge.
Helping People Verify their Skills and Knowledge
Currently, it’s hard to verify people’s knowledge, which in itself makes it hard for knowledgeable people to differentiate themselves from relatively less knowledgeable people. Many institutions searching for so-called “human capital” would also benefit from an improved way of knowing people’s initial skills.
For the longest of times, traditional education avenues have formed the basic measure of knowledge. From pre-school certificates to high school diplomas, moving on to higher or tertiary education represented by college and university degrees, the practical quantification of what people know has always been through a piece of paper. And the quality dependent solely by the reputation and prestige of the certificate’s issuing body. However, problems exist with this system that have been left unaddressed.
The Problems With Qualifications
Firstly, there are different standards to which these qualifications are issued. With no real way for anyone to verify if the person possessing a degree truly has attained that level of knowledge it seems the value these degrees actually provide to people is largely a matter of guesswork for the third parties trying to assess people’s actual knowledge from them.
If a group of people graduating from the same year all have the same qualification, the only way to go deeper is to request for grades, which can be a lengthy and cumbersome process.
Secondly, as the quality of education is attached to reputation and prestige of the issuing institution, the cost of pursuing education there is significantly higher. In fact, the cost of higher education is increasing worldwide, anyway, and students are forced into higher debts each year. British students ran up study debts of $55,000 in 2016, up from only $20,000 five years ago. American students recorded an average of $35,000 last year, up 6% from 2015.
What this means is that those who can’t afford quality education may never own a degree – and never be able to prove the knowledge they have.
Making the Verification Process More Transparent
Within the Knowledge platform, users validate each other’s knowledge and expertise, earning Knowledge tokens as a monetary reward for the information they provide. All this is validated through “gamified learning” – or learning centered around designed-incentives that motivate users to continuously engage the platform – and verification of expertise through objective measures.
The measures are determined by the Knowledge Score technology, which will be used to assign values to each participant, objectively evaluating their levels of knowledge across a range of topics. Complemented by vast, proprietary data sets available through its partnerships and a base of over 10 million questions across a topic spectrum, the possibilities are virtually limitless to generate a continuous supply of Questions and Answers.
Thanks to blockchain innovation, a user’s learning is validated, tracked and record permanently in a public, immutable ledger over the course of their life. Thus, Knowledge.io provides students the ability to both pay their own way through school and demonstrate their knowledge through their accumulated contributions to the platform as they are recorded on the blockchain.
Knowledge Tokens Attract Experts to the Platform
Knowledge.io has its conceptual origins in the recognition, rewarding and celebration of knowledge. It assumes that all knowledge is valuable not only to the individual that possesses it but to the society that benefits from interacting with that knowledge.
As such, Knowledge.io believes they can foster the best possible situation in this regard by leveraging the blockchain to verify scholars and proteges — helping them connect to advertisers like tutoring agencies and so forth, thus optimizing knowledge retention for all.
The Knowledge.io platform plans to launch its crowdsale campaign with a pre-sale on 15 January, 2018. 10% of the total Knowledge Token supply (25 million) will be made available during the pre-sale, while a further 20% (50 million) will be put up for sale during the main public ICO to be announced at a later date.
