Educating the world on Cardano: initiatives and plans for 2020

Education has always been a key part of IOHK’s strategy. Our mission is to grow our global community and business through the medium of education, and to share what we have learned. By claiming leadership in worldwide education on blockchain technology, we have the chance to shape the field for generations and to leave a lasting legacy.

A consistent theme from 2019 has been the demand for a broad range of educational content, as demonstrated by the feedback received about the Incentivized Testnet, as well as the steady flow of support requests to our helpdesk. A key focus in IOHK for 2020 is to develop and expand our education materials as we transition fully into the Shelley era and then to the Goguen era of Cardano.

The IOHK education team will be investing significant time and effort this year in broadening our range of materials. We aim to enhance understanding of our technologies using a variety of learning and training assets targeted at a wide range of stakeholder audiences, both internal and external. This will be vital as the use of IOHK technology moves into the mainstream. We also aim to provide knowledge and information to enterprise decision-makers so they know what business problems our technologies can solve. We have lots planned and many projects are underway as we grow Cardano into a global social and financial operating system.

What can you expect?

We started 2020 with lectures, by Dr Lars Brünjes, our director of education, at the University of Malta. The focus of these lectures was on Plutus and Marlowe, our programming languages for smart contracts. The fruits of these sessions will, in turn, form the foundation of some modular training materials that we plan to formalize and develop over the coming months.

Our free Udemy courses on Plutus and Marlowe by Alejandro Garcia have proven very popular, with over 5,000 students signed up. Feedback has been positive and, as a result of what we learned from our students, we’ve been making incremental improvements over the last year. We now want to take this to the next level and are planning to fully update both courses soon to bring them up to speed with the latest development changes and new features. We are also in the initial planning stages for a second edition of the ebook, Plutus: Writing reliable smart contracts by Lars Brünjes and Polina Vinogradova, which we will be publishing later this year. The writing team has started to identify improvements and we are also gathering feedback directly from readers. If you have suggestions, please raise a pull request in our Plutus ebook GitHub repository with your ideas.

An important step in bridging the gap between our academic papers and mainstream understanding of these concepts is to teach people about Ouroboros, the proof-of-stake protocol that powers Cardano and ada. In response to the valuable feedback we have received from running the Incentivized Testnet, we are planning to create varied educational content to help stake pool operators understand Ouroboros and how the protocol works on a practical level.

Broadening our reach

To broaden the reach of our training courses and content, we are also investigating a way to migrate our popular Haskell training course into a massive online course, or MOOC, while also making it more comprehensive with the inclusion of Plutus and Marlowe material. In this way, we hope our MOOC will make the course even more valuable, and provide access to the widest possible global community. In addition, we are planning a comprehensive classroom-based Haskell and Plutus course in Mongolia, details of which will be finalized soon. We plan to use the introductory part of the online Haskell course as a primer for this face-to-face training. This is an example of a core efficiency that we are embracing where we aim to reuse content on Haskell, Plutus, and Marlowe across a variety of stand-alone modular materials that we can use externally and within the company for developing our staff.

We appreciate the value of interactive and meaningful training workshops, so we intend to host many more this year in several locations around the world. These events are in the initial planning stages and the first in the series will take place in Quebec in the spring. We’ll announce more details through our official channels – Twitter, email, here – nearer the time. The IOHK education team are on hand to support and prepare the necessary learning tools for participants to use at these events.

Alongside these materials and courses, we are mentoring an undergraduate student at the International University of Management (ISM), with her thesis on the topic of the power of blockchain in emerging markets. Additionally, Dr Jamie Gabbay has been invited to contribute to the book 'Applications of new generation technology to cryptocurrencies, banking, and finance’ by Devraj Basu.

Internal initiatives

We are also working with our human resources team to build the IOHK Training Academy: a new learning portal for our internal teams to upskill and develop professionally. This new resource is part of our learning and development strategy that aims to improve employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention. We want to provide access to a library of assets so our staff can easily find exactly what they need. We will be developing tailored ‘learning journeys’ by function, ready-made content that will help people develop skills in new areas, as well as creating specific onboarding journeys for new starters. This is a vital resource for a fast-growing company with staff and contractors spread across 43 countries and will prove to be an important asset for all our people.

2020 is going to be a pivotal year for Cardano and we are looking forward to playing our part. It is our aim to teach both individuals and organizations how to use the protocol, and how it can help with their everyday lives. We have lots to do and we look forward to sharing all the educational content that we produce with our existing community, as well as those of you who are new to Cardano.