This is an editorial by Robert Matthews, Lecturer at Nottingham Business School.
University education is expensive. Even within the United Kingdom, Tales of Departing Students with £90,000 (about $115,000) of debt is common, which raises the question of the value that can be achieved with a college degree when matched by such a large cost.
To help manage the magnitude of this spending, it is now very common for students to take up part-time, if not full-time, jobs, with recent figures showing this to be the case for the majority of students In the UK the same article also reported that the time some students spend on university work is affected by the time they devote to paid work.
As a college teacher, this situation causes me great personal discomfort, with students incurring debts for a college education that they can’t spend enough time on or truly benefit from, and unable to develop the critical thinking skills for which college graduates are valued. This creates a dilemma for budding college students: whether their time and money would be better spent on a college education, developing practical skills, or simply buying bitcoin, as Bitcoin Magazine’s Nick Hoffman suggested.
University education has experienced more difficulties in recent years. In addition to the costs of pursuing higher education, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the line between in-person and online education increasingly blurred. Attending and participating for a long time problem in universities, and I can confess I have had problems with those, making late nights arriving at a 9:00 a.m. lecture or staying at a two o’clock seminar after my constitution. Add the new option to “catch up” with lecture recordings or comprehensive online materials, and the draw to attend in person can drop even more.
Possible solutions for higher education
How to address this is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for higher education, as institutions explore options such as income earning “digital badges” To complete activities or attend sessions f Progress tests during modules to link participation from earlier in those modules to final grades. Each of these options, with the potential for increased participation, involves significant setup costs, so additional duties may be added on staff to manage and record results for each student. Unfortunately, keeping tasks simple enough to quickly manage and record may cause them to become mundane tasks, which in turn may not promote the engagement they aim for.
The problem appears most clearly in units that require independent learning, such as the dissertation units that can serve as the pinnacle of undergraduate learning, where the unit material is linked to relatively general research skills, which are then applied and developed as the student completes a project of their choice. Compared to a more traditionally structured unit, where students gradually cover the content of an essay or test at the end of term, students need to do a lot of learning at the outset, in order to choose a relevant topic and be able to plan and design a project that simply cannot be left until a week before submission. While weight-bearing proposals and staging deadlines can be made to ensure early engagement with subjects, at times, they do not seem to foster sufficient engagement, with feedback from students continuing to take the form of “I wish I had started earlier.”
An alternative approach to boost participation in the units was to offer cash prizes for best work. Unfortunately, given the disconnect between starting a project and receiving an award, students who have done well in the past are likely to be those who participate in these projects as well, whether there is an award or not. For those students who are generally less engaged, they are also more likely to view such an award as unattainable when comparing themselves to their peers, and thus refuse to change the way they approach their work.
The question then arises as to whether there could be some form of financial incentive, but combined with the promotion of good working practices early in the unit. A form of “treasure hunt”, which requires students to cover available online material, as well as attend sessions in person to complete a challenge and win a prize. Fortunately, Bitcoin is fixing this.
Involve students early
The solution now seems so simple, I’m upset because I couldn’t see it before. But then again, isn’t this how many bitcoiners feel when they look back on the first times they were introduced to Bitcoin?
The question is, what effect would including a bitcoin wallet seed phrase in unit material have on early unit participation? The logic seems strong. By presenting the challenge at the beginning of the module, and then locating a 12- or 24-word initial phrase within specific material across the first parts of the module, engagement will be theoretically enhanced. If students want to have a chance to open the wallet, they will have to attend specific sessions and review important materials online.
By grading when certain material (with specific words) is available to students, there will be less risk of students clearing all the material on the first day, while providing slower beginners with the ability to catch up, for example, if only ‘x’ words are available at the start. Compared to some forms of session participation and progress testing, aside from the inclusion of the seed phrase in the material and the cost of the bitcoin itself, the costs associated with this approach are low.
By also keeping the amount of information about the award given to students relatively low (covering ‘value’, ‘bitcoin wallet’ and ‘seed phrase’), the impact on the material you need to cover in the unit is minimal. A potential benefit of this approach is that students will have to explore what these terms refer to, if they haven’t already discovered them. approach too Requires The winner, and even those who complete the task but are unable to withdraw the funds, download the wallet, restore it from an initial phrase and then complete a transaction by sending bitcoin to a wallet they control the private keys to. The eventual winner will not only know what Bitcoin is, but also prove that they can use the technology.
A subtle approach to delivering the “B word”
Compared to specific attempts to convince others of the value of bitcoin, whether showing the problem bitcoin fixes (thank you, Austin Herbert) or identifying those who can best spread the word (thank you, Héctor Alvero), “pilling orange” would not be the immediate goal of such an undergraduate program. Having said that, in a strange way, this approach would boost the network of lecturers, and could introduce the topic of Bitcoin to anywhere from 50 to 500 students in a given unit. We hope that students will be confident in the information they receive from their lecturers, with possible individual follow-ups providing them with opportunities to ask questions and develop their understanding.
To bring this Bitcoin experiment back into the realm of academia, it helps to at least acknowledge how it relates to learning theories. the well-established model he proposed John Briggsknown as “constructive alignment”, suggests that it is not about the students or how they present the material, but instead about the work the student does that determines what they learn.
The goal of including a bitcoin seed phrase in the course material is to get students engaged with the material early on, so that they can craft projects with time left to complete them. The indirect orange pilling happens when students become familiar with Bitcoin, learn how they interact with the network and, perhaps, begin their journey down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
If the students want to win the reward, they will have to engage with the material, observe the initial words, as each student starts from the same point, and hopefully motivate them to participate enough to have a chance to win the prize. Even those who didn’t win the award hopefully got more involved than they otherwise would (which is a positive for college education).
A disappointing scenario would be for no one to engage in a treasure hunt, but unlike giving a prize to someone who would have done the work anyway, this situation would at least mean that the bitcoin would remain in the original wallet. The last scenario that could be considered a risk is if the student falls deeper into the rabbit hole and ultimately neglects their research project. However, I might struggle to find a Bitcoiner who would see this as an entirely negative outcome.
People dealing with Bitcoin who do not understand Bitcoin broadly, are asked if the credit is to reach a critical mass. The “Number go up” (NGU) technology is undoubtedly a great marketing tool, which may explain the level of interest my students had in “crypto” in 2021, which didn’t exist in 2022, but NGU doesn’t sum up the richness of the subject. While not including an initial statement to reinforce student engagement earlier in a unit is not an overt, intentional, impassioned, or emotional move, it does enhance interaction with and learning about the protocol for financial gain (reward winning). As Tim Niemeyer writes, learning about Bitcoin should be the first step before considering whether or not to buy the asset.
From the teacher’s perspective, the secondary goal is to get students interested in and talk about the unit. From a Bitcoiner’s perspective, the goal is that the next time someone mentions Bitcoin, students will have a personal experience to draw upon that hasn’t been affected by the media or wider news reports about the latest scam. From both perspectives, providing final year students, who are ready to advance in the broader business world, with more knowledge about an important innovation like Bitcoin is a worthwhile activity.
Providing newly recruited graduates (tasked with instilling new ideas and perspectives into existing companies) this informed opinion can help businesses on a path toward adopting Bitcoin in their operations. A student might be able to say, “I once had a lecturer put 200,000 sats in the purse for us to claim” when parity for dollars has been reached. Alternatively (and perhaps more pragmatically), they might say, “I paid off my student loan in bitcoin, and my first session came from a bitcoin-obsessed lecturer.”
I would be glad if they said too.
This is a guest post by Robert Matthews. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.