The New web3 Education Landscape

Transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] hello hi everyone and welcome um I hope everyone is having a great start to their ACCC and the first day for you is as inspiring as it was for me additionally I just want to say thank you to the ethcc staff for making it so amazing and making us all feel so welcome and I really appreciate this opportunity to speak to you today I am Stacy Quackenbush I am CEO of third

Academy and we are really positioned to reinvent the future of work to innovate on education in the web 3 space and to onboard the future of web 3. so today I wanted to talk a lot about what it means to be an educator in web3 and every single company here is an educator you may not think so but as I talked to one founder yesterday people are educating as fast as they're innovating because the space is so new and the advancements are happening so rapidly that each of us is creating messaging either internally to our

future consumers or through our marketing that is really education focused uh third Academy we have decided to take the approach to invite everyone in to really be a support system for all new companies for their content for their ability to onboard the best and the brightest with a platform and with metaverse campuses some of the ideas that I'm going to talk about today are some of the ideas that we're working on so the new education landscape in web 3. today we're going to take a stroll through metaverse gaming tokens blockchain and credentialing all of these areas are familiar to all of us but what does it mean in the web 3 educational landscape

let's start out with metaverse campuses um came across a really interesting statistic a couple days ago where there are 400 million people worldwide using the metaverse that was a lot higher than I actually had considered there's an anticipation that that number will jump up to 600 million in the next three years seventy percent of users are using the metaverse for non-gaming applications now when you think about this and you think about the applications for Education they're quite substantial now a third Academy it was really important to us if we were going to include metaverse campuses in addition to the platform where we're aggregating the

best and the brightest content they had to be photorealistic they had to be a direct connection from what you do in the physical and we because we were finding that the majority of our students are from the continent Africa Asia and India it really made sense that everything we do is mobile and browser-based so let's talk about courses Workshop panel discussions job fairs pitch section hacket bonds all of these things we do in the physical we can move to the virtual courses and workshops you have this added capability with the metaverse where you can in real time bring in a 3D object that floats Among Us that we can

turn upside down that we can analyze you have the ability to have a space that's open 24 7 which is really great when you're building worldwide projects the other thing you can do is you can expand your job fairs your pitch sessions your hackathons as extensions of things like these conferences one of the things that's always amazing to me is that conferences you go in and you have a high you have a high for three days or a week and then the conference ends you made all of these relationships that you have to kind of scurry and keep connected with when you bring your conference into the metaverse you have the ability to keep this vibrancy alive in between the IRL events

so building a network of fact of community and innovation love it or hate it meta did something really interesting when they launched their first metaverse Horizons is they went and they scoured the world for the best and the brightest Community Builders that's a really interesting thing Horizons has a lot of communities that use their space regularly love it or hate it and one of the things that we did one of the things I did was recruit one of those top people immediately and I'm happy to say that we launched three metaverse campuses in the last three weeks and they are fully reserved why because we seated it it's like

building a colony on Mars you need to pick the right people with the right intentions to come and create the events to build for you to build with you and to support the overall vision so we need to educate education differently now this is where I want to leave everyone here with the idea that they're going to go forth and set new intentions right what we want to do is look at our teams look at the educational marketing that we're putting out is it ordinary are we doing anything playful have we innovated on it we've got all this technology but we're still doing dry blog posts we're still doing talks that are not

interactive so I challenge everyone to really consider this so let's talk about gaming gaming is a huge industry you don't need my chart to tell you this but are we thinking in terms of gaming strategy when we reach out with our education initiatives with our marketing why do we want to do that oxytocin and dopamine the same reasons we all go to dance parties the same reasons we all want to play have we integrated play into what we do even think about your internal teams right like part of what we think about at third Academy with our platform is you know we're aggregating content we're creating user profiles but we're

connecting people to their future employment opportunities the future employers are living in our metaverse right you have this ability to create a unique new way to operate let's take advantage of that in this moment right new technology should meaning new thinking once again immersive events build communities what are you doing to reach out to other groups where are you collaborating most importantly are you thinking in terms of diversity and inclusion right now here in the web 3 moment we have an ability to do that bigger and better than we ever have before

so let's talk about incentivizing participation incentivizing peop and participation keeps people loyal right everyone wants to be aligned with communities that support their ideas communities that make them feel loved involved and included and appreciated right that's all I work here at ECC because we feel appreciated we feel supported and understood by this community so keep that in mind when you're building virtual events keep that in mind when you're educating make sure that you give people on your teams the opportunity to get greater credentials more skills don't just say it offer up the time in the space within your organizations to make that happen issue co-ops and don't

forget about things like that an award tokens so I'm just preaching to the choir with the next slide but blockchain has enhanced transparency so when we think about educational records the ability for us to utilize our wallets as certification of our skills in web 3 is going to change a lot it's going to make it a lot easier for us to vet future Talent it's going to be a lot easier for talent to actually prove they've got the abilities they claim they do we've seen this over and over again whether or not you're on the hiring side or you're looking for a position there are people out there that claim they have the skills that they

don't in this space and this is about to change additionally we think that your wallet will replace your resume that that old system which is still in effect it blows my mind that if you're looking for a position you are literally submitting this document and you're refilling that form out with every company really is this as as good as we can do is this how you want to find your future Talent is this the kind of organization with all of this technological capability that you this is the best that you can do like I want us all to really think about that I think that if we advance the systems we

will have more trust in recruiting the best talent will naturally rise to the top one of the things we're looking at at third Academy is creating a system where your profile is not about who you like it's about or who you follow it's about what communities you participate in where did you go what'd you do what are you working on that we think is really robust so let's talk about disrupting education one of the things that infuriates me generally in in education and there are quite a few things as you can tell is the average student loan debt worldwide

really really we're gonna we're gonna tell our young people to get educated to go into debt fight your debt and then find your career this has got to change and web3 has such the power to do so because it's advancing so rapidly and it's available online that people anywhere in the world can get credentials to get a job that pays them better than they can get in their local community another infuriating statistic being from the US this one blows my mind the federal government owns debt holds a debt on 1.6 trillion dollars the students of the United States owe 1.6

trillion dollars to their government that is absolutely obscene so we need to create a system where people come to web3 to get educated and get rewarded where that reward system empowers the oxytocin the dopamine that makes us feel like we can accomplish anything that makes us want to work harder for the companies and the communities that we're joining why is this all important let's talk about in diversity and inclusivity here if we've got the power to educate we have the power to be intentional in 2022 238 billion in Venture Capital was disbursed to

startups that's a staggering figure but where did it go this blows my mind female Founders got 1.7 percent think about that this is 2023 1.7 percent if you were a female minority if you were a person of diverse background you got even less this to me is not about Prejudice it's about the opportunities for women and minorities we really have to support that moving forward we have to make that a priority in all of our organizations

why because we actually perform highly we actually execute at a very very high level and that can't be underscored when I think about the lack of inclusivity in education I wonder how much Brilliance are we missing how many brilliant people throughout the world have we not seen what ideas what type of innovation have we not integrated into our companies so what what can we do let's educate through play in IRL and virtually let's look at does immersive experiences are we utilizing all the best technological tools to not only educate our own teams

but to educate and onboard the public that to me is super important let's incentivize learning at every aspect when we talk about incentivizing our internal teams when we talk about external events invest in and recruit members like if you're going to promote somebody make sure you make it public make sure you make a big statement about it especially if it's a woman or somebody of a diverse background we need to celebrate this more and we want to provide credentials and Pull-Ups so web 3 Community Education once again I'm Stacy Quackenbush from third Academy and these are images from our first

three metaverse campuses um our total goal is to support new companies and to support the onboarding of people to web 3. so if you are producing educational content if it is podcasts blog posts courses let me know we're happy to broadcast it and publish it in a greater way to a bigger community and we're also welcoming new people into our metaverse campuses for co-working for education for workshops for teaching people once again Stacy Quackenbush from third Academy thank you all

[Applause] maybe if somebody has questions hi uh thanks for a great talk there uh I guess this is more of an observation but education as an industry is is kind of in a changing moment uh covid accelerated a digital uh transition towards digitized learning and then um the founder staple the fusion like has a bunch of side projects going on and he deployed AI agents in to deliver math and literacy curriculum in a refugee camp and the kids there were getting scores that were above what kids

are attaining a normal sub-Saharan African schools so it strikes me that you're in a moment that really allows you to capitalize on a lot of Trends and you could own a lot more of the delivery of Education with these new digital tools and integrate these uh gamification and incentive mechanisms on top of that to amplify reach and engagement so yeah just an observer I love what you're saying and I really do believe that AI is a critical tool um there's a lot that you can do in the world of Education especially virtually and invest especially in immersive experiences so like real-time translation of courses like that is

absolutely something we have built in so that you could have a myriad of people in the same room and each person um in the meta versus getting their own language and that's really important right because we have the ability then to collaborate worldwide and span distances and I think the Innovation that'll come from that is pretty extraordinary I think that AI also in the future of work is really pretty important to us as well because your wallet and your ability to match make people um very seamlessly at least criteria and and credentials it just speeds up the process so we can get a we can get rid of this archaic system of how people apply for jobs and get hired it just

blows my mind thank you for that um I have a question too I I did not try um quite understand how um how you okay how is the system working for Education like for the educational um how do you create a system that educates the people um are you are you hiring people directly or are the projects supposed to reach out to you like the educators are supposed to reach out to you and say we want to educate in this field we want to do this in this this in this way yeah great question um so the way that we're doing it is is

we've built a platform where we aggregate the best content so you can submit content to us we're actually looking actively for content and as a user you would go in and you could put in whatever topic you're interested in studying and you would get all of the options and the options would be ranked by community members and additionally you can organize what you're searching for by type so you could say I want a live class I want a metaverse class I want Evergreen content I want information that's a blog post also you would have a user profile your user profile is where it logs in Via your wallet all of the credentials that you've earned via our platform all of the events that you've attended via

co-ops and each community that provides the educational services and the credentials has a page as well all of this links back to the metaverse so as you sort through the courses that you want to study you could take one of the metaverse Additionally you could set your profile up so that you're getting real-time notifications that there's a job fair happening live in the metaverse that there's a pitch contest you can get notifications that you're now invited to attend a hackathon so you've got this ongoing community that not only educates but provides a social fabric to keep you interested and provide you with collaborators and consultants and job

opportunities topics for like little children like substituting schools or like offering schools and really poor countries in Africa for example that cannot go to school well it's that's a really great question and the majority of our current students we've had over 2 000 to date and we haven't launched publicly yet um have been from the continent Africa and from India and we've actually hired some people from Africa but to your point as far as primary and secondary school education that is on our roadmap and everything that we're building here for web 3 we can reproduce

um four different areas of education and we're looking at doing a version for primary and secondary school students that is gated in a different way so you've got edited security having worked for zigazu as their web 3 advisor the largest social media app in the world for children I'm very much aware of the security issues regarding that and that's kind of in our future sites but right now we're focused mostly on web3 thank you for the talk uh it's one of my favorite topics gamification and

education and I have a question regarding like for example me also I like remote working and all this stuff but how you are doing what are you doing with um present uh feeling of presence because it's still very important when we talk with each other in person seeing eyes not in like flat or not in your avatars because it's quite important to understand the easier or to ask silly questions when you see the person very close agreed agreed and that's actually been something really important to us as well so in the building of our metaverse campuses which are also co-working spaces so any company that comes in will

have these spaces to have people have meetings and and whatnot but you have the ability to have your avatar pop up a screen so almost like a thought bubble and you can see faces so sometimes so we have meetings in our in our metaverse we want them off and other times we want them on but I do understand what you're saying there it definitely is that need additionally we went with a um hybrid Avatar um Unreal Engine Ready Player me so that we got as close to um reality as possible and the ability to create your avatars as simple as letting the camera on your login take a photo of you but I agree with you and that's how we remediate it so you do have the option to turn it on if you

need it thank you maybe also scanning is could be in the future because there are scanners for scan and maybe if you translate your face and 3D it could be yeah I love that so um that's you said there's a reward system I'm sorry there's a reward system for um for like for these students yes um so you're you're trying to um pay them by tokens like gamify it for their achievements in the system yeah so our completely yeah that's in it's in the

pipeline right now and one of the things that we're really considering um like I said before everyone in this space is essentially an educator because we all have to put out content that supports the technology so we're really looking at ways that it's not just only third Academy's incentive system each different player in the space each community that provides content or experiences can create a token system that suits their needs so that's that's the thinking so you can get rewarded from a variety of different sources in different ways based upon how they want to incentivize the potential students or employees yeah just following on from that if you are giving providers the freedom to

design their own incentives that happens to be one of the hardest problems to do and get right aren't you gonna offer them some sort of like boilerplate Solutions um what yeah and what testing are you doing around all of that sort of stuff because creating a sustainable and you know that's why a lot of us are here we haven't cracked that yet yeah no that's absolutely correct um that is a really challenging problem in this space and we're working really diligently and bringing in some of the top talent that we can find to help us with that solution yeah completely agree um in the interim it'll be an internal third Academy reward system but eventually it it really needs to be a reward system that different players can

contribute to and um I think that's the only way that it's going to be really meaningful for everyone involved thank you thank you guys [Applause] [Music] thank you

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