Cardano Learning Needs Assessment has been proposed in Fund8

English Education
1

Hello,

Being new to Cardano myself but having an educational background I decided to propose a kind of community-powered needs assessment. As you’ll see this project is designed to involve the community in creating an ongoing, open-access resource for everyone learning anything Cardano.
The proposal is here
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/403244

Since some readers here may not want a Catalyst account, I’ll post the proposal here.

For more info or to get involved, pls email me at michael@modigdev.com or get in touch on Discord, MichaelModig#3086.

And, please give this proposal your vote in Fund8!

Thanks, gracias, merci, danke schoene, 谢谢

Problem statement

New users in Cardano have trouble knowing what to learn and where to get help. Resource development and availability tend to be random.

Summarize your solution to the problem

Poll groups and individuals to establish a list of things a person needs to know to function in various roles in the Cardano ecosystem.

Summarize your relevant experience

Collaborated on survey that went out to 1000+ health care professionals in Canada, created final version in SurveyMonkey. Experienced in project teams creating online courses and digital resources for post-secondary. Experience with DACUM, task analysis. Design thinking.

Please describe your proposed solution.

General idea

  • Through surveying the community, establish a publicly-available list of “things to know if you’re going to do stuff in Cardano.” This list will represent an ongoing needs assessment of simple and more complex competencies needed to function in the Cardano environment.
  • The list becomes a living document that gets periodically updated by the community.
  • Eventually learning resources will be associated with the list; however, this project only aims to conduct the needs assessment part i.e., creating and validating the list of competencies.

General plan

  1. Create an Introduction to the survey
  2. Create the survey using SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or another tool
  3. The survey will present an initial draft of the list, currently at around 30 “tasks” in five or six categories
  4. The purpose of the survey is simply to allow community members to respond to the latest version of the list and suggest edits
  5. In this project the survey will be offered twice

The list is NOT meant to

-Be required in any way
-Give information on how to do the task; it will only identify the tasks and categories of tasks.

More details

  • Web development will allow edits from the form to be made visible to the public.
  • Over time the list will be updated periodically and made available to the Cardano community.
  • The initial list has around 35 tasks in a few categories and several sub-categories. All of these are expected to change as in, categories added, deleted and merged over the iterations (attached).
  • The last step involves reaching back to the respondents to help with disseminating the existence and specifics in the list. Thus the Cardano Learning Task List continues to evolve, becoming a maximally practical and useful resource to the Cardano community.

Please describe how your proposed solution will address the challenge?

Many groups in the Cardano community will find this list useful.

  • Individuals or groups interested in developing content especially for new-comers
  • The new-comers themselves
  • Stakeholders interested in onboarding e.g. Cardano Foundation, Catalyst
  • Others

A learner will be able to work through this list. Knowing “what” to learn will help that person find resources on “how” to do the task.

People wishing to develop resources will have very granular/specific things to focus their content on. This is necessary since many tutorials e.g. on YouTube cover the same generic topics, leaving other topics uncovered.

A second question one could ask the community might be, what would you like to learn?

The resulting list will be released under the auspices of the Cardano Foundation and/or under non-commercial CC license.

SUPPORTING THIS CHALLENGE’S KPI’s

This list will

  • Help increase meaningful participation from challenge teams, proposers, advisors, mentors and voters, by equipping them with clear direction as to how to prepare themselves for the tasks involved in each of these roles.
  • Encourage new members to utilize the tools and services available for onboarding, by pointing to the tools and giving a general idea what they’ll need to know in order to use the tools and services.
  • Over time and with participation of stakeholders, further competencies can be added for different categories e.g. IdeaScale, Townhalls, Catalyst School, Swarm sessions, Circle.
  • This list will improve the use of existing text, video and audio materials by giving specific direction on what should be learned from the resource.

What main challenges or risks do you foresee to deliver this project successfully?

  1. Lack of participation from stakeholder groups - To mitigate, contact community members in various communication channels (Discord, IdeaScale, Reddit, etc.
  2. Difficulty in disseminating the final list, given the amount of activity in the Cardano ecosystem - To mitigate, reach out to Cardano Foundation and IOHK for assistance in publicizing the list
1 Like
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I like the idea of a structured, science-driven approach to making the on-boarding better very much!

But it is a pet peeve of mine that sciences – and especially social sciences – are for some reason taught that only quantitative methods are “real” science to the point, where they totally neglect qualitative methods.

In your specific case: Creating the task list for your survey is a very non-trivial thing, where you should do something like (expert) interviews, open calls for suggestions, …

At first, I thought that this is only a minor issue with my pride, because I have some ideas about what people should learn early on, myself. See, for example: Better Introduction for Newcomers? or “My ADA are gone!” First Aid Collection

But then I looked at the task list you provide as an example at Ideascale and I’m a bit surprised. There are a lot of items on that list that should specifically be there, because I never would have put them there. I have more or less ignored Catalyst, because it’s just too hard to assess the flood of proposals (and as you guessed correctly, I didn’t have an Ideascale account until a few minutes ago).

But: Whole areas of topics – which are arguably much more important than the things surrounding Catalyst – are completely missing. There is nothing about wallet apps, wallets, seed phrases, transactions, (E)UTxOs, nodes, pools, native tokens, decentralised exchanges, Plutus contracts, order books, liquidity pools, technical and social security risks, financial risks, … in this list. And these are all topics that are quite or even very important for new users of Cardano. Why is there Discord in the list, but not the forum, Telegram, or Twitter? Why is Miro even in that list?

This can all be fixed, but I feel that it needs a whole phase in your proposal, a phase with extensive research and not just:

1 Like
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Hi there,

Thanks for this intelligent response and for your posts, I will study up on that info, looks good! Yes, many if not most in the community are more into prices and markets than developments, definitely. These topics you mention are gold, thanks very much.

Regarding methodology, I agree it’s non-trivial, that’s why the idea is for the community to do the work. You yourself have made an excellent contribution here with this post. With these ideas I’ll go back to the list and make an edit (not today). Your specifics make me think the shared document might have columns for ‘task area’ e.g. wallets, then ‘things you need to be able to do’ such as ‘select a wallet’ and then sub-tasks from there, ‘evaluate your wallet needs’, maybe as further columns. The format will emerge, wiki-like but not a wiki per se, at least not initially is what I’m thinking to keep it super accessible to editing.

So yes it’s a focus group, but a distributed one. Naively I’m assuming a Google doc will work, with perhaps periodic publishing to a web page.

The phase after supplying areas as you’ve done is to come up with the verbs that apply the information, e.g.

  1. Check your addresses on cardanoscan.io .

This becomes, “Check an address on Cardanoscan”

  1. Resync the wallet.
    Becomes, “resync a wallet”
  2. Try to restore with your seed phrase on another device, in another browser, in another browser profile.
    Becomes, “restore a seed phrase”
  3. Try another wallet app – adalite.io , ccvault.io , ….
    Becomes, “select a wallet”
  4. Remove your wallet (app) and reinstall and restore (only if you are sure that seed phrase works because of 3. and/or 4.).
    Becomes, “restore a wallet”

Each of these becomes a task with sub-tasks. With resources a team could curate e.g. three videos addressing each task. It could maybe be limited to the ‘Top 100 Cardano Competencies’.

The trick will be to keep it as simple as possible. It’s only a map at various altitudes.

Cheers and maybe we’ll talk some more, I’ll also add a section for contributors to the list and you’ll be the first one.

1 Like
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Thanks for your proposal, I think there is a real need for a Learning assessment. Many in the Cardano Community are struggling to learn about the new applications and how to do different tasks on Cardano especially in the different wallets being offered. I myself spend countless amounts of time researching subjects so I can be involved in the Catalyst Community.
Your General Idea is well placed but I would rethink the aspect relating to updates, where people are still learning in this community a dedicated admin or several admin persons to verify the correct information is being added would be a necessary requirement so as not to create confusion.
Adding in different levels of learning for example: Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced so as people contribute and/or visit your application they can build on their knowledge, starting out at the beginning and as there knowledge progresses work through the different levels. It would be great if you could put links to the official knowledge articles/vid/apps, starting with the white paper from Charles Hoskinson. I find the biggest problem with peoples knowledge base is they will jump past information that is relevant to the whole project and then have no understanding of the importance or direction of the mission behind the Cardano project. It is a big ask for new people coming into this to understand the language, how the wallets work, what the applications are, what NFT’s are accessable to everyone, and then what Catalyst is.
Good luck with it all I hope you can progress with this proposal and look forward to the outcome as it goes through development.

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Hi Shelley,

Yes, there really is so much to learn and we want to minimize that being a barrier as much as possible. As I read through proposals as a CA and attending some meetings, I see a lot of people have Cardano education on their minds. But it needs to be organized somehow.

I agree with your point too about someone to admin this when it comes to linking up the resources to the map. I’ve been seeing it as an ongoing curation task. The things to learn are probably infinite, and there are so many ways it could be organized, and maybe there could be different schemas/map views for the same material, similar to Google Maps with satellite, map, and street views.
For organization, as you say Beg-Intermd-Advncd maybe could be one. We won’t know until we get more mapped out to see what makes sense.
I came across this schema in one of the proposals, which I find has some good examples of groups in the Cardano community:

  • ADA holders who are unaware of the Cardano ecosystem and Project Catalyst
  • Start-ups and Entrepreneurs
  • Students (Schools and Colleges)
  • Blockchain Enthusiasts
  • Blockchain experts
  • Crypto Trading enthusiasts
  • Haskell/Plutus developers

For “students” maybe that would be replaced by “Noobs.”

So already with these two pieces of input, the next version will already be quite different. I’ll probably go ahead on my own for a bit, yes, it’s a hot topic.

The business of linking up the best resource for given objectives will be a big job in a changing landscape. Maybe some group of volunteers will step up and take that on. I met a DAO in Discord that maybe would be interested. They, like virtually everyone else I’ve since, are hot to trot to develop resources, but without an overall plan. This proposal is only to get a robust map going, not to fill in all the intervening bits.

Thanks for your encouraging comment.

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Interesantes debates, leí, solamente quiero agregar que en las ciencias tanto el método cualitativo, como cuantitativo, son herramientas muy buenas, y ambas deben estar presentes, no se debe hacer ciencias sean sociales o matemáticas, basandose solamente en alguno de estos dos pilares. El éxito esta en conjugar ambos. Dejando el ego del profesional o la carrera que el sujeto haya estudiado de lado. si se logra ese objetivo serán grandes los resultados a esperar. Mis saludos a toda la familia Cardano, queridos amigos y amigas.

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Thanks for this nice comment, I agree, “multiple measures”