Agustin Cortes, cofounder of lirn.io, is changing the economics of education. He also closed out our morning keynotes at the Web 3.1 Leadership Summit speaking about his perspective on the future of work and his company’s solution for validating skills and comprehension using NTT’s, aka Non-Transferable Tokens.
You may remember Agustin as an internet autodidact who we interviewed separately in advance of the conference. His story is representative of many from his generation, more in tune with collectivism than individualism, expecting accountability and high integrity as a default. It is this mindset, and indeed this heartset, which is central to the rise of DAO’s and the embodiment of core principles within the broader Web 3.0 movement. He also speaks plainly to our needs and means for creating trust, using these trustless technologies.
As many others like himself, being self taught, he recognized the need for an authoritative mechanism for education and skill validation without the traditional certificate of a college or post graduate degree. Lirn.io is working to solve this problem, and we at Web 3.1 are very proud to support him and their work.
With Web2, online learning occurs in silos. For example, if you took courses in online platforms such as Coursera, Udemy, or edX to name a few, the confirmation that you completed those courses and acquired those skills stayed in those platforms. There is no official documentation to confirm that you satisfactorily completed the programs and gained the skills. A collective data experience is needed to provide the learner with a form of validation.
As he details in his keynote which you can watch below, with Web3, users can create an internet learner identity which could serve as a proof of education by leveraging learning activities, testing, and digital wallets. Agustin explains that decentralized apps, which are in many ways like a website, utilize the blockchain through a user’s wallet. This connection allows the user to have complete ownership of their educational accomplishments.
Lirn.io has three core areas of focus: proof of knowledge, proof of skill, and legitimacy. Proof of knowledge can be likened to theory a learner would gain from the education itself. Successful completion would earn the learner an NTT, or nontransferable token linked to that individual’s wallet. Gaining proof of skill, or exercising knowledge by way of implementing the learned skill, would also earn the learner an NTT. Legitimacy would be based on social consensus, so more participants in a particular program will give more validity to that particular NTT.
With this framework, learners would have the ability to show their wallet to employers, and employers will be able to see the knowledge was acquired by them specifically since the NTT cannot be fabricated. This is the premise of providing proof of education with Web3.
Agustin explained that one of the main keys to success of this framework will be a collective agreement between learners, educators, and employers to adopt this system. When these key players find a unified stance in favor of this framework, proof of education will itself become validated on the web.
This isn’t something that will be easy to do, but by aligning the interests of individuals and society, we will once again prevail over the institutions and the status quo. We really have to if we are to make Web 3.0 fulfill its promise. These principles are at the heart of what we mean by Web 3.1.
Which is why we are proud to be forming a community project team to advance the design and development of an open standard for a Web 3.1 solution to educational and credential validation. Of course this is only one part of the broader system, so I am very excited to share that as of today we have a small group researching tokenomic for sustaining community engagement, alignment, and compensation with a special look at the difference contexts for mixing or separating intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.
There is so much work to be done. This is only the beginning. Watch his talk below. Then, join us.