Sunday, February 19, 2017

Paid to Play


Paying students and teachers alike, not necessarily at the same rate given different responsibilities, does not assure that any given school will stay afloat. The true cost that never goes away is "opportunity cost": what you're doing right now is at the cost of everything else you're not doing.

Even if my code school pays a stipend of N ETH per completed task K, who says task K is relevant to one's long term plans? You could have gotten N-2 ETH for completing task T at another school, but guess what, the relevance of T is so much greater, that the -2 delta is more than made up for. You've factored in opportunity cost.  Good for you, that's smart.

The model LMS that meters out credits in the form of some non-cash currency, not legal for all debts, but good towards many things anyway, is premised on the wish to reward and support those doing what we regard as real homework, developing in ways a program promises its enrollees will.  Whether we need a blockchain technology to make it work will depend on many factors.

Those with a GST background will have more responsibilities helping government services figure it out, in collaboration with participating universities.