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title: Maker Academy Introduction

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# Maker Academy Introduction

Hello to everyone, and thank you for
joining the SES Weekly Status Update
call. I am Retro, a contributor from the
Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling Core Unit.
Today we are joined by a familiar
face: Colby Anderson. You may remember
Colby from previous update calls and
forum posts discussing a research grant
he had exploring scalability solutions
for governance with an emphasis on
range polling.
Colby's ability to synthesize concepts
demonstrated a unique profile that could
play a larger role at the DAO. Today
we are looking forward to announcing him
into the SES Incubation Program as
the potential facilitator for Maker
Academy. Before I turn the mic over to
Colby, I want to remind the audience to
submit any questions they have in the
chat at any time during the presentation
and we will ask you to unmute your mic
during a break in the action, or at the
end during the Q&A.
With that, Colby, the floor is yours.
Thank you for such a flattering
introduction.

Let us just begin.
Before I talk about Maker
Academy as an Incubating Core
Unit, what kind of our purpose is, what we
plan to do, some of our goals, and
when we have planned to become official,
I would like to just start by kind of
telling
the story behind Maker Academy;
why we saw it was necessary as a new
Core Unit,
and just go over the motivation
for Maker Academy.
To start, I will talk a little bit
about my learning journey 

with MakerDAO.
To start, I already had some
experience in the 
blockchain space with DeFi,
just studying on my own,
self-learning.
But with Maker, I was not too familiar.
By the time I had to
interview with Maker for my initial
grant,
I decided it was time that I delved more
into Maker. I started learning about it.
But I was faced with many learning
obstacles. The first one was
that it was unorganized, the information
that is currently out there.
When I first had my initial
search,
there were many different sites,

not only from Maker but also from other
websites. When you first type in
Maker, MakerDAO learn, Maker education,
stuff like this, start researching
to learn more, as I am sure all of you
have in the past,

the first things that show up
are medium articles. Then there are
articles from other websites. And then,
finally, when you get to the Maker
specific stuff, stuff that makerDAO
has produced there are like 20
different websites. All
these different websites are very
similar. When you are trying to
learn, and you are initially confronted
with this,
it is very confusing. Because you do not
know where you should start with the
go-to sources. You just have
40 different options and no idea which
one is the best. Because
there is no consensus on this is the
go-to source for education.
And so,
you also do not know which ones to trust.

Not to mention that the
stuff not coming from Maker like medium
articles, things like this, they have much
higher SEO. So that is kind of what
you are presented with first,
at least in my experience. You
kind of ask yourself: can I trust
this if it is not coming from
MakerDAO?
Once you have all these sites, and
you know the different sites with
educational material, there is no
efficient pathway through them. 
You are confronted with all this
information. And based on your goal,
whatever that is, maybe you want a master
Maker, maybe you want a specific job,
you want to contribute in some way,

there is no kind of curriculum to get you
from beginner to a specific goal.
You just have all this content, and you
kind of have to invent your own path.
I mean, it is a pretty hard task.
When you get to, for example,
university and, let us say,
you want to have a computer science
degree,
it is not like you just choose your
own courses for the whole degree.
There is usually some requirements,
some sequential ordering of courses and
the point of that is people
who are experts in computer science
they know the most efficient
path, all the prerequisites for
certain information, and you kind of go
in the sequential ordering. It makes
learning much more efficient. That is
always a problem with self-learning, is
you do not have this, and it is especially
true in the case of Maker.
The next learning obstacle is
duplication.
There are not too many sites
explaining
very in-depth Maker-specific stuff.
But there are a lot of sites and a lot
of articles explaining the basics of
Maker. 
Like I said when I was
initially researching MakerDAO and
confronted with so many different
sites,
they all basically said the same thing:
just what Maker was very broadly, or
what the DAO was very broadly.
So it is basically
not much help reading the same
thing 20 times.
Next, it is outdated. There is,
from Maker's point of view, no team to
consistently
update all the different educational
sites.

As a result, there is information
all the way back from Single Collateral
Dai
to the old Auction System to
assuming that there is still the Maker
Foundation running all this. When
you are learning you obviously
do not know
the most up-to-date information. So when
you read this out-of-date information
you think it is correct.
It can become very confusing if you
first read the out-of-date information
then you read the up-to-date information,
then you do not know what is correct.

And not to say there is plenty
of up-to-date information out there just
not all of it. And since there is no
go-to site it is kind of hard to
distinguish where that up-to-date
information is.
The next is just missing information.
As I said, there are plenty of sites
describing Maker broadly. But
what if you want to master the Maker
Protocol, for example, like I did.
When I was kind of
having my initial grant with
the SES,
I wanted to master Maker so
I could
be the most productive
kind of contributor I could be
and have all the context required to
kind of innovate.
But
besides a bunch of broad
information about Maker, I could not
really find in-depth educational
material; stuff about
how the DAO manages IP
and all this kind of stuff. It would
be
ideal if

every aspect of Maker there was
educational material for, not just
overall but in-depth stuff.
And
this exists to some
extent. Although this information can be
found deep inside MakerDAO's forum, and
the different
Maker improvement proposals on
our MIP's site,
it is not meant for education
purposes. It is meant for
the community to inform them on what is
going on. Just the standard
of the
education
is not met.

It is also hard to find,
being buried in forums and MIPs.
Lastly is substandard
communication.
A lot of these articles and educational
material
are not to the standard that

you would typically see in an
educational setting. The
typical standard is a textbook, something
that
follows very specific
guidelines in terms of communication and
pedagogy.
I am not going to get into them here but
this is something that Maker's
educational material still does not
achieve.
These learning obstacles that
I faced both during my initial learning
process and during my onboarding process
they also affect the hiring process.
For example, in other industries if
you
want to learn a skill,
it is pretty simple. If you want
to go into finance
well, you just go to university. And then
if you want to
enter yourself in kind of a candidate
pool that tons of different employers
and businesses
reach into to hire you, well
it is the same thing, you just go to
university.
You kind of at university acquire the
skills, you learn what is out there
in terms of opportunity, and then
get recruited, but since the DeFi industry
is so new,
of course, university has not
caught up, and as a result, there is no
alternative. In the DeFi industry, we
have to
create our own version. And that is why
you see all these other academies
popping up because there is a need. And
specifically for Maker, we
definitely need one. How nice
would it be to have a place where
everybody could go learn all the
relevant skills to contribute,
and then we can leverage
that pool of learners to hire for
MakerDAO?
That is
where we come in: Maker Academy.

Kind of the slogan here; we
just try and take people throughout the
the full pipeline. From
when they have their goal,

providing them with the education to
meet that goal, so learning,
and finally,
implementing that end goal, which is
hopefully contributing and innovating.
To discuss our mission and vision
real quickly: The essence of
Maker Academy.
We see education as
having a
few positive effects.
One: It is going to increase the
proficiency of current contributors and
potential contributors. We are
not just developing information that
is going to be duplicated
to a higher standard of what has already
been done. We want a lot more
information. Something that even
current contributors can benefit from
whenever
they are not aware of some concept with
MakerDAO. The idea is that they can come to
Maker Academy and learn.
And we do not only plan to do this but
there is also another audience
who will never contribute to MakerDAO.
Maybe this is end
users' people who just use Dai or
vaults things like this. Or
maybe the average person who is
never going to use that stuff. But
still, education
is used for acceptance. People
are not going to accept MakerDAO if they
do not understand it,
regardless of whether they are an end user or not.

Educating just the general public
is going to help the acceptance
of Maker as well.
An important word here is
facilitating.
We plan not to produce all the
content ourselves. In Maker
Academy we say our background is in
more communication pedagogy education
coming up with the material,
knowing how to come up with the material.
But we are not experts in every field.
Ideally, we would be
facilitating these experts in producing
content. We will be producing content
ourselves, but this is just a more
scalable way of doing things.
Next step: our vision. You can kind of see
the four main points of our vision there.
This vision is just a direct
reflection of
answering the question; "okay, these are
the problems Maker Academy is trying to
solve,
let us imagine a world where these
problems are solved". And that is how we
came up with our vision.
Lastly, here a note at the end.
There are many different audiences that we
can focus on in terms of education.
There are contributors, all different kinds
of contributors, there are laymen, there are
end users, stuff already talked about.

But we do not have the resources to

create educational material for
everybody.
We have to prioritize somehow,
and we chose to focus on potential
and current contributors first because
obviously
these people have more of an impact on
Maker than the laymen.
This is a sneak peek,
I guess you could say,
about what we want

one of Maker Academy's products or
educational platform to end up looking
like.
You can see it here. Just
imagine
if
during your own learning process,
whenever you learn about MakerDAO, or
if you plan on learning about
MakerDAO
that you could filter by tons of
different filters. You could filter
on DAOs, finance, computer
science, development, business, management,
beginner, intermediate, whether
it is a course, an article, all these
different things,
all kinds of content at your
fingertips and you can search for
anything.
It is much easier
than being confronted with a bunch of
different sites that are hard to
navigate and you
do not know what you are getting into.
There is no indexable educational
material for Maker that currently exists.
Next, up-to-date. We are going to
have a full team behind this; Maker
Academy. That is going to ensure that all
content is up-to-date. Not only this, but
on our platform, we end up building,
it is going to be quite decentralized
meaning that users can submit edits on
all content users can upload their own
content.
Now there is going to be a barrier.
Maker Academy is going to you
review this information.


When people are reading a
course, they see something that is out of
date, they can just submit the edit
themselves. So it is much more scalable
this way.
Lastly, full coverage. Obviously this
is something we cannot just offer at the
get-go. We cannot just produce an
infinite amount of material
regarding MakerDAO but this is kind of
our vision, this is something we plan to
get to; covering even the most niche of
Maker topics.
And lastly, quality control. We
plan to use our background in
communication and pedagogy in order to
ensure the highest standards
when presenting this educational
material.
The next step is we plan to provide
tailored education for all different
audiences.
What does this mean?

Ideally, your learner has goals.
They want to do something
with the information they learn. And so
we plan to provide these things called
programs. Now, what are programs? As you
can see here, programs are sequentially
ordered content.
The idea is to take you from
absolute beginner to a contributor
in some specific way. For example, the
Facilitator Onboarding Program this
would take you from beginner to
being competent enough to be a
facilitator. This is kind of
a
glimpse of what the Incubation Program
for SES could look like.
And

the reason for doing this is it is
much more efficient. It compresses
the learning curve of the student. If
they are left with searching for
all this different content, not sure
if it is going to accomplish their
goals or not, it is much easier to come
here to this program and
it will find a right program
for them. The idea of programs
versus content is similar to in
university; your courses and
your degree,
where a degree would be a program.
And another thing we plan on offering is
certificates. For everybody who
completes a program we would like to
give a certificate too, and there is
different ways we plan on implementing
this but it is basically a testament of
your knowledge.
And lastly, we plan on implementing the
end goal. Well, end goal for some, which
is contributing to MakerDAO into
the learning
process.
It is
sometimes very hard to become
motivated to self-learn.
But when it is obvious how you can use
that information that you learn to
start contributing and maybe
making innovations or money or all sorts
of stuff.
And so on our website, we plan
to have these things called contributor
pipelines which is basically
every way in which you could contribute
to MakerDAO.
We have it recorded, and you
can see " oh, I can
contribute in this way," and then you
click on whatever opportunity there is
and then it says about the
opportunity and not only that but
what programs or what content is
advisable and the skills you
need to know in order to
have an opportunity like this.
And so
it is incorporating this end
goal into the learning process
hopefully, will make it a lot more
obvious on what learners can do with
the education.
Next step is just a little about our team,
Retro has introduced me already
but to introduce a few others, we have
Zach.
Zach is the project manager of the
educational platform
I just demonstrated.
Well, that was a mock-up but
our future website, Zach is the project
manager for. we also have a front-end
developer
Salman Fazal.
And lastly, we want to hire a technical
writer,
somebody to help me in the
curation and production
of educational material for MakerDAO.
And this is a small
team, only four people, but that is just
to get things up and running.
After we
prove to the community that
we are
useful we plan on hiring more people to
help because we have many big
ideas in terms of education.

Our site specifically and other
things that I will get into at the end
of this presentation.
And four people in the long term
is not going to cut it. So
we will hopefully expand the team as we
prove our usefulness
to the community.
Our initial road map.

First, our MIP submission. We
do not want to submit a MIP until
we know ourselves that we have a
product that is tested, reviewed and
appreciated by the community, and that is
actually useful.
Without a website or anything you
know we are not going to submit a MIP.
Basically, our MIP timeline really
depends upon our products and services,
when we get them out there and when we
start testing them, to know that we are
useful and to let the community know
that we are useful.

Our first product
service we are going to be offering is
this website that I showed you
earlier.
And
we plan to get the MVP
sometime around April.
This MVP is going to be
a fully functioning site with a
little bit of content on it that we can
let the community test out,
get feedback, and then implement
whatever changes are necessary.
Then after that initial MVP
release will have a very good idea and
so the community about our effectiveness.
Then we plan to go with the RFC
process with the eventual hopefully MIP
approval.

After this MIP approval
is when we
plan on
releasing the fully-fledged website with
tons of material, and stuff that
we were developing based on changes in
the MVP process.
As I said, our ideas
are big. We do not want to limit ourselves
just to a website. We have many more
ideas.
Maker academy
would be sufficient alone with just the
website. There is so much growth
and maintenance just to be done there in
terms of the material, the UI, things like
this. But we plan to be
bigger that and
maybe produce a podcast for MakerDAO,
a documentary, a large-scale one,
about the origins of Maker and how is
kind of the original
DeFi
project and how is the innovator
in the space in a lot of different ways.
I feel like there is a lot of potential
with the documentary. It is obviously a
very large thing, but that is far in the
future.
Next, into pushing for
integration with traditional
education. So trying to get
knowledge about DeFi and Maker into the
university system making it more
accessible.
And lastly, going to more DeFi
conferences, educating the broader DeFi
community about Maker and our new
innovations. We plan to be at
the forefront of education in all
different mediums but first and
foremost is this educational platform we
plan on developing.
This is it. If you would
like to reach out, here are some
potential reasons to do so. One if you are
interested in making content.

If you want content developed
you see some kind of need for
educational material to be developed but
you do not assist, that is fine, we just
like to know what everybody thinks
just in general; improvements, ideas
for our Core Unit,
If you would like to work with us in the
future, and eventually if you would like to
test out our website or our
current version of it, our mock-ups for
it,
all help is welcome. Here are
a few different ways to contact me.
But essentially, that is Maker Academy
in a nutshell. So
I am glad you could all attend, and
stick through to the end of this
presentation.
Thank you, Colby, for that great overview
and introduction.

I see a couple of questions and chats.
Frank, I will give you the
opportunity to unmute.
Okay, cool, got it. Oh, thanks, man.
It was a great presentation, Colby. Good
stuff.
It looks
like something obvious that is
definitely needed, and I am excited that
your team will put together. But I
wanted just to ask you:
what would be a pivot with
regards to training,
creating these training tools,
and how do you plan on identifying
if one of these tools is not working,
it is not gaining traction?
And how do you plan on pivoting?
What are your techniques for
identifying such? And what are your
techniques for pivoting from one
training method to another
in a nutshell?
Definitely a good question.
To rephrase, basically:
what are metrics for success?
When will we know that we are
actually being successful or not? And if
we are not, knowing those metrics
to change, or what to change
in order to be successful.
And so,
we have a few different ideas. And
first I would like to say that
luckily our education
is not going to be person to
person. It is conducted through an online
medium, a website. And so, with this
we have the power of obtaining a lot of
different analytics.
Analytics from the amount of
users who are watching our content, the
amount of users who are watching or
reading specific parts of our content,
and not others. How many people are
making content on our site, how many
people are editing content, the
amount of users logged in. Different
trends in these analytics.
How many people are starting
these programs, but not finishing them.
how many are actually getting
certificates, how many who
have made an account with us,
done some programs, and we see
that they have initiated
some end goal whether
they applied for a grant or
reached out to somebody based
on that. We plan on tracking
all this with software
and analytics. And the idea there
is
there are so many, tons of
analytics we could track in this
education process.

At first glance, it is hard to
reason what will be
the most important metrics to keep track
of for success.
And luckily, that is why we are
designing a model where

we plan on tracking as many analytics as
we can so
we can always adapt over time and
realize "okay, we are not doing so
well here. How do we improve? We are not
doing so well in this other area. How do
we improve? And as we become
more knowledgeable about
what success is, we will have
analytics, and a history of those
analytics to realize if we are
meeting that vision or not.
And so, to start with, what I think is
some of the most important metrics
is
one; retention, and two; completion.
By retention: how many people
are
starting the courses, finishing them.
How many people are finishing the
programs? How many people are making
accounts consuming lots of content, as
opposed to the total number of people
that we attract, and maybe
they immediately leave, some of them?
Retention is huge. Two is
what I term
completion. And by that, I mean how many
people are actually

doing something with the education?
How many people are contributing? How
many people are becoming a user of Maker?
Some of that is hard. This is
harder to measure,
but it is still doable. If we
incorporate these contributor pipelines
in our site, there are ways to,
with software,
eventually, track who is actually
contributing, or planning to contribute,
or applying to contribute,
things like this. I see those as two
of the big metrics. A smaller metric is
just how many people come to our site.
And this has to do with more marketing
than anything,

but it is still important nonetheless. So
I hope that answers your question. Let me
know if I did not.
Yes, yes. And yeah, sorry to
interrupt. We plan on having
testimonials reviews,
things like that.
And hiring a separate team to monitor
user feedback
that is
too hard to determine right now.
That
depends on the scale of us.
To start, we do not have any
user feedback. Our site is not even
out in the wild yet. We do not have
a reason for that just yet. But in the
future, if it makes sense and
if the site is very popular,
and we are getting tons of feedback, then
we will definitely hire
what is ever needed to keep track of that.
But go ahead, sorry I interrupted.
Yeah
believe Frank said that concludes
his question.

We will leave the chat open for just
another minute here for any last minute
questions. I want to hop on the mic, and
quickly say that as a new contributor
here for just a couple months, I would be
excited for this resource. There are
still definitely some gaps in my
knowledge. Definitely, I am excited on a
personal level, outside of incubating the
Core Unit, to have this resource
available.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Since the
chat here has quieted down. I think we
will wrap up today's session. I want to
thank Colby, again for joining us to
present Maker Academy.
The conversation is always
ongoing in the forum as well on the
Maker Academy Discord.
