The declining competitiveness of teacher pay is resulting in a dire shortage of educators worldwide, and severely risks threatening education quality. A recent Unesco study revealed the world needs another 44 million teachers if every student is to receive a proper education. 

In the U.S, a reported 86% of schools are struggling to get teachers in the door, while in the U.K, newly qualified teachers regularly leave British shores to find better pay abroad.

Amid this tumult, new technological advancements are being applied to the education industry to bridge the gap between teachers' effort and reward and generate new ways for teachers to earn fair compensation for their efforts. Enter decentralized education (DeEd).

What is Decentralized Education?

Decentralized education applies the benefits of blockchain and NFT (non-fungible token) technology to the education sphere to enable students to learn from anywhere in the world free from physical or institutional roadblocks. 

On the teaching end, educators can embrace decentralized education to create learning curriculums and study programs tailored to the needs of individual students, and earn recurring income every time a student engages with their work.

The shift towards DeEd is being driven by the emergence of innovative new technologies which have appeared at just the right time to tackle the glaring failures of an education system laid bare during the Covid-19 lockdowns, and could revolutionize the teaching landscape to incentivize more teachers to pick up their chalk.

Education in the Web3 Space

Pioneering initiatives are currently being launched in the Web3 space to address the teaching shortage, exemplified by the $10 million Global Educators Fund by Open Campus through their premier partner, TinyTap, an authoring program that enables teachers to create gamified, interactive lessons for students. Open Campus and TinyTap currently boast a community of thousands of educators and millions of students around the globe. 

The Open Campus fund incentivizes would-be teachers and supports their creation of educational courses, providing up-front and ongoing revenue. 

The resulting educational material may be shared and promoted around the world through tokenization in the form of Publisher NFTs, awarding Co-Publishing Rights to the holder who benefits alongside the teachers from their marketing efforts when a student accesses the content. 

TinyTap, which was recently acquired by Animoca Brands, has partnered with Open Campus to act as the publication platform for early-childhood educational materials created through Open Campus. 

With a library of over 250,000 gamified teaching lessons published in 24 different languages, TinyTap has learning programs tailored to students of all ages and backgrounds. The genesis TinyTap  'Publisher NFTs' which enable ongoing monetization of educational content, of just 12 educational courses  sold for over 240 ETH (worth over $351,000 at the time), and recently released 720 Publisher NFTs for games which sold for over 138 ETH (worth over $100,000 at the time).

A New Paradigm in Education

The collaboration between Open Campus and TinyTap sets a blueprint for how education can be delivered to a global learner base, while ensuring that teachers retain digital copyrights, and are fairly and transparently compensated for their efforts. 

This blueprint makes full use of the latest technology, evolving the learning process beyond the classroom, and enabling students to learn through interactive mediums.

What's more, the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) format used to govern protocols like Open Campus guarantee that the teaching community itself is in charge of its own future, removing decision-making power from a handful of executives at the top and returning it to the boots on the ground.  

Emergent technologies are meeting a global teaching crisis at just the right time to demonstrate the success of DeEd. The same distributed, decentralized model that's currently revolutionizing numerous far-flung industries is also ready-made for an education sphere that's suffering from a lack of investment and poor remuneration. Educators, take note.