OCP-12: Proposal for Open Campus U

ABSTRACT

Vision

KIP Protocol, the official AI Partner for Open Campus, is proposing to develop, launch and operate Open Campus U (“OCU”). OCU is an AI-powered education platform powered by the new EDU Chain.

We envision Open Campus U to become a Coursera-like learning platform with a diverse range of educational content, but with the heavy use of AI features like chatbot tutors, AI powered Apps, as well as decentralised KnowledgeKeys (vector databases containing academic content, curriculum and knowledge of teachers that created the course.)

For more information about KIP Protocol, see Appendix 1: About KIP Protocol.

There are over 23,000 Universities with approx. 254 million students and millions of teachers, the vast majority have yet to be onboarded to web3. Colleges and Universities are amongst the most important foundations for entrepreneurship and economic development globally.

The use cases of AI in education are extremely obvious and significant. From areas serving students like adaptive learning, personalised feedback, to technologies helping educators like intelligent tutoring, automated grading, AI will make a huge impact on tertiary education.

OCU will be akin to Coursera on AI-steroids, integrating the most accessible and useful of AI features to immediately add efficiencies to the education process. Coupled with blockchain enabled transparency and verifiability, features like on-chain education credentials become natural and powerful extensions.

OCU’s go-to-market strategy will be B2B2C, under which our aim is to onboard university professors, academics and educators and publish their courses onto OCU. They will endorse OCU as a recommended learning medium to bring their students to use OCU in their studies. Ultimately our goal is to onboard these students onto Open Campus/EDU Chain as well.

The onboarding of their educational materials and knowledge bases will extend the influence of the Open Campus ecosystem into tertiary education and academic research. At the same time the educators will be able to monetise their courses through OCU’s AI powered edtech features.

In addition to the adoption of $EDU and the new EDU chain, we believe that the OCU will unlock opportunities for the Open Campus community to extend its influence to tertiary level scientific and research content.

Focus Areas

Working closely with Open Campus, we propose to expand the influence and reach of the Open Campus ecosystem into tertiary education and academic research through the following areas of work:

  1. Technical: Developing Advanced AI Features for OCU + Maintaining Day to Day functionality
  2. Business: Running the business operations of OCU, with the primary objective of onboarding leading professors & academics
  3. Branding: Rapidly build up the brand trust of OCU, OC and OCID through the involvement of professors from recognised universities from around the world

We will use our AI and blockchain features empowering true ownership as a leap-frog strategy over existing Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers.

Goals

Our primary business targets are to onboard the following into OCU within 18-24 months:

  1. At least 400 professors, educators and researchers; and
  2. At least 900 curated tertiary level courses from the educators mentioned previously, which will be made available to students to learn; and
  3. At least 1,000,000 new Open Campus ID learners

Establishing the OCU Committee

We also propose to establish the OCU Committee, comprising prominent academics and Open Campus’ community members & strategic partners. This Committee will supervise the work of KIP in OCU operations, while also serving as ambassadors, introducers as well as vetters for any other new applicants.

MOTIVATION

KIP Protocol’s mission is to catalyse the decentralisation of AI. We believe the best way to achieve that is via the creation of viable business ecosystems within actors in AI acting in a decentralised way.

To this goal, we have developed multiple prize winning technological innovations including our KnowledgeFi monetisation framework, and our decentralised Retrieval Augmented Generation (d/RAG) data orchestration framework.

We share Open Campus’s vision of a decentralised future in education and believe that AI + Web3 is a force multiplier in education. However, more work needs to be done to ensure that use of AI tools do not fundamentally threaten the ownership of our knowledge in the AI-powered future.

Education, especially tertiary education, is a business area we are very familiar with, and extremely passionate about. Our past clients in AI include institutions (and professors from) Kings College London, National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University, Seoul National University, Adam Smith Institute etc.

We are also AI partners of a leading academic and education publisher that serves hundreds of universities around the world.

Our work with these leading organisations belies our firm belief in that Education is an area where AI will create the greatest impact for society. Indeed, we are already seeing rapid adoption of AI tools by tertiary students.

DESCRIPTION OF OCU

Open Campus U is a decentralized online education platform, with powerful AI functions, that shall offer a vast array of courses taught by leading professors and academics.

It aims to provide flexible and affordable education to millions of students worldwide, and a robust marketplace for educators to monetise their knowledge, while retaining full ownership rights.

We intend to run OCU as a revenue generating platform, to be a leading decentralised online learning and teaching marketplace. OCU will be launched on EDU chain, powered by KIP’s d/RAG technology, which will also be deployed onto EDU Chain to power the issuance of KnowledgeKey assets representing on-chain ownership of professors’ educational content.

The business model will be primarily pay-per-query, but it is also an option for us to introduce subscription based plans running on top of the pay per query model.

OCU’s unique selling points, compared to other educational platforms both in Web3 and Web2, are:

  1. AI Powered Features for Students and Educators
  2. Decentralized KnowledgeKeys
  3. Monetisation of Owned Educational Assets

OCU Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sALLFlSM5A

The following screenshots and demos of OCU serve to show the features of the platform.

Post launch, the actual content will feature professors and actual educational content. (instead of Web3 personalities and their social feeds)

OCU Homepage

Creating a KnowledgeKey

AI App eg: Quiz App

.

AI App Demo: AI Study Companion App

BENEFITS TO OPEN CAMPUS

  1. Accelerated adoption of OCID through onboarding university students
  2. Extending reach of Open Campus Ecosystem into tertiary education and academic research
  3. Revenues which will accrue to the Open Campus Treasury
  4. Synergistic injection of KIP’s academic relationships into ecosystem

KEY INFORMATION

Grant Program and Use of Funds

Defined terms:

  • “Course” means the course materials / notes, reading list, textbooks and their intellectual property rights (if owned by the professor) which are owned by the onboarded Professors.
  • To “Onboard” means to mint each Course into a KnowledgeKey and students can interact with an associated AI Apps and the course content fully uploaded onto OCU for students to access.

Total Program Funding: US$ 10,000,000

The OCU Committee

The OCU Committee comprises 7 members who are responsible for reviewing and validating OCU Grant applications submitted by prospective participants.

To ensure the necessary oversight mechanisms are in place, candidates selected by the OCU Committee Committee for each cohort must be formally ratified by the Open Campus Council before they are deemed valid.

We are nominating the following OCU Committee members for voting and approval by the DAO:

  1. Dr Jennifer Dodgson, Chief AI Officer of KIP Protocol
  2. Julian Peh, CEO of KIP Protocol
  3. Jake Hughes, Marketing Lead of Animoca Brands
  4. Jonah Lau, VP, Head of Portfolio of Animoca Brands
  5. Megan Miao, Head of Programmes of NewCampus and APE_U Project Lead
  6. TBD
  7. TBD

The Committee will convene every 6 weeks to review the latest. In between formal meetings, committee members will communicate in an ad hoc manner as needed. Monthly time commitment will not exceed 5 hours. Hourly rate US$100, so each committee member will get paid $500 per month. EDU token holders can submit a proposal to replace any OCU Committee member.

Key Project KPIs

  1. Phase 1: Reach 50 Professors, 10k Monthly active students*, 100 courses^
  2. Phase 2: Reach 100 Professors, 30k Monthly active students*, 225 courses^
  3. Phase 3: Reach 300 Professors, 100k Monthly active students*, 375 courses^
  4. Phase 4: Reach 600 Professors, 150k Monthly active students*, 750 courses^
  5. Phase 5: Reach 1000 Professors, 200k Monthly active students*, 1,250 courses^
  • Monthly active students are students that undertake learning in at least 1 course available on OCU per month.

^ Assuming 25% of the professors are onboarded through OCU Fellowship and the remaining 75% through OCU Grants

Rollout Plan Timeline

After Rollout Stage II: OCU will enter into a more stable growth stage, and the things to do will be more operational driven by user feedback and behaviour.

RESOURCING

Operational Expenses

A team would need to be set up to handle the daily running of OCU, which will start at USD 20,000 a month, and will increase as milestones are met.

The final state, when OCU is serving >200,000 users every month, the costs will reach a ceiling of around US$90,000 per month that will cover payroll expenses following hires.

Other notes:

  • AI tools will be integrated to minimise fixed overhead expenses.
  • The full team will not need to be in place at the beginning, but should scale up as the number of professors onboarded and courses integrated gets more.
  • KIP will bear responsibility for managing all staff on a day to day basis.

Partners and Advisors to OCU

The team behind KIP Protocol has worked with numerous academics and professors from all over the world. We will activate many of them to help spread the word.

COMPENSATION

Management Fee

As the operator of OCU, KIP Protocol will charge a management fee comprising:

  • 2% of the total amounts disbursed under OCU Fellowship, OCU Grants and OCU Scholarships (the “Management Fee Amount”) will be paid to KIP Protocol, to be calculated and paid out on the final day of each quarter.
  • 9.5% of the total dollar-value of the allocated size under the OCU Fellowship, OCU Grants and OCU Scholarships, upon achieving the milestones below and vesting schedule:

Income Share

3% of the net income (after deducting operating expenses) generated by OCU (the “Income Share Amount”).

GRANTS APPLICATION & REVIEW PROCESS

The application process below will apply generally to applications for all Fellowships, Grants and Scholarships.

1. Announcement and Outreach

  • Responsible Party: Outreach Team
  • Objective: Inform potential applicants about the available funding opportunities.
  • Actions:
    • Publish announcements on the OCU website, academic journals, and relevant platforms.
    • Send emails to university departments and academic networks.
    • Host webinars and information sessions to explain the application process and eligibility criteria.

2. Application Submission

  • Responsible Party: Outreach Team
  • Objective: Collect applications from interested candidates.
  • Actions:
    • Applicants submit their applications through an online portal.
    • Required documents include: CV, research proposal, course syllabus, endorsement letters, and a statement of purpose.
    • Ensure the application form includes sections for personal information, academic background, proposed research, and courses to be onboarded to OCU.

3. Initial Screening

  • Responsible Party: Research Team
  • Objective: Filter out applications that do not meet the basic eligibility criteria.
  • Actions:
    • The Research Team conducts an initial review of applications to ensure completeness and adherence to submission guidelines.
    • Applications that fail to meet the basic criteria are rejected, and applicants are notified.

4. Detailed Review and Evaluation

  • Responsible Party: Research Team
  • Objective: Evaluate the merits of the applications based on established criteria.
  • Actions:
    • The Research Team reviews the applications in detail.
    • Evaluation criteria include subject matter expertise, content suitability, potential reach, completeness of the application, balance of subject matters, geographical diversity, and size of the applicant’s student base.
    • Each application is scored based on a standardized rubric (See Appendix 3 - “Selection Criteria”).

5. Final Selection

  • Responsible Party: OCU Committee
  • Objective: Select the most promising applications for funding.
  • Actions:
    • The OCU Committee reviews the scores and evaluations provided by the Research Team.
    • Final decisions are made, and selected applicants are notified.
    • Unsuccessful applicants are provided with feedback.
    • The final list of selected candidates is ratified by the Open Campus Council.

6. Grant Disbursement

  • Responsible Party: Outreach Team
  • Objective: Disburse initial funds to the selected applicants.
  • Actions:
    • Successful applicants sign a grant agreement outlining the terms and conditions of the funding.
    • Initial funds are disbursed according to the agreement, with subsequent disbursements tied to the achievement of specified milestones.

7. Course Integration and Feedback

  • Responsible Party: Project Management Team
  • Objective: Onboard Professors and their existing courses into the OCU platform and set up each professor’s AI Apps.
  • Actions:
    • Grantees onboard their courses to the OCU platform as per their proposals.
    • Feedback is collected from students and educators to assess the effectiveness and impact of the courses.
    • Continuous improvements to the OCU platform and courses will be made based on the feedback received.

8. Monitoring and Reporting

  • Responsible Party: Research Team
  • Objective: Ensure that funded projects are progressing as planned.
  • Actions:
    • Regular progress reports are submitted by the Research Team to the OCU Committee on a bi-weekly basis.
    • The Research Team conducts periodic reviews of the projects.
    • Site visits or virtual check-ins may be conducted to monitor progress and provide support.

9. Completion and Evaluation

  • Responsible Party: Research Team and OCU Committee
  • Objective: Evaluate the overall success of the funded projects and their contributions to OCU.
  • Actions:
    • Final reports are submitted by the grantees detailing the outcomes and impacts of their projects.
    • The Research Team prepares a summary evaluation.
    • The OCU Committee conducts a final review to assess the achievements and contributions of each project. At the discretion of the OCU Committee, underperforming grant recipients may be cut from the program.
    • Success stories and case studies are documented and shared to highlight the impact of the OCU grants, scholarships, and fellowships.

RISKS & DRAWBACKS

The specific details, such as funding amount, key milestones, and corresponding funding for each milestone, will be collaboratively determined and discussed between the DAO Administrator and the successful applicants to ensure successful applicants are held accountable to deliver on their commitments with regards to Open Campus.

GOALS FOR THIS PROPOSAL

The goal of the proposal is to secure approval for the allocation of US$10 million over 18 months for the Program, and identify and approve the initial 5 OCU Committee members responsible for overseeing the program and platform operations.

Appendix 1: About KIP

KIP Protocol is a decentralised AI infrastructure company. Together with our associate companies Kipley.ai and Eigenform.ai, we have been active in commercial AI work since 2019. Our technical focus has always been on building usable AI products that orchestrate data flows between models, applications and data sets. Our recent technical innovations have focused on setting up payment and monetisation frameworks for AI assets in a decentralised environment.

We are extremely experienced sellers and promoters of AI technology with our past clients including: World Bank, King’s College London, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University, Adam Smith College, Thailand Institute of Scientific and Technological Research and numerous government ministries.

Appendix 2 - Information on KnowledgeKeys

KnowledgeKeys

By transforming educators’ teaching materials into AI-ready KnowledgeKeys, Open Campus U aims to make knowledge ownable, protectable, shareable, tradable and investible.

We believe that the sum total of a good teacher’s knowledge has a value, and that rather than detracting from his or her human expertise, AI has the power to become a force multiplier.

There has been traditionally 3 ways of monetising knowledge:

  1. Fixed Format Monetisation: Someone with knowledge puts their knowledge into a book, or a file or a physical device (CDs etc), and sells that one time.
  2. Time Based Monetisation: Someone with knowledge is paid money to come share that knowledge (teachers, speakers, educators), effectively exchanging time for money
  3. Subscription Base Monetisation: Someone with knowledge releases a regular stream of knowledge in return for subscription fees

With AI technology, OCU and KIP are empowering a new mode of knowledge monetisation: KnowledgeKeys.We help educators provide content in bite-size chunks with the aid of AI. Learners can buy only the information they need on a pay-per-query basis, without being forced to pay exorbitant academic prices for the parts they aren’t interested in.

Likewise, teachers can provide online access to all of their knowledge without sacrificing their intellectual property rights: because the knowledge a student requests is summarised by the AI rather than being presented as a copied extract from a book or a chapter, there is no way for anyone to steal or resell the original materials.

Moreover, because the KIP d/RAG system is decentralised, there is also no way for the AI-inference provider to scrape the content either.

To turn their knowledge into a KnowledgeKey, an educator simply vectorises their content, thus making it “AI-readable” - accessible and deliverable to users only via an AI model. At the same time, the KnowledgeKey is permanently associated with an on-chain token (effectively an NFT, but can take other formats like the ERC 3525 semi-fungible token standard) and a unique code that will be used to control access and manage payments.

Only learners within the OC ecosystem can access the information via the teacher’s chosen AI app, and proof of every interaction recorded on-chain to be settled automatically by KIP’s payment contracts.

Tokenizing Your Knowledge

To create a KnowledgeKey, a user must:

  1. Sign in using their Open Campus ID;
  2. Choose a data source: Twitter, Notion, Substack, Mirror, Medium, Youtube, a custom API or a manual file upload;
  3. Customise the KnowledgeKey with an image, title, description, category, token symbol and price-per-query;
  4. Vectorise and mint the new KnowledgeKey (free mint, user pays gas fee only) and register it using KIP’s “Assets” contract;
  5. Delegate a wallet address to receive user payments;
  6. Connect your knowledge-key to a preset AI app, granting it the code it will need to access the vectorised data (this decides the model and hyperparameters that will be used to present the information, as well as the format under which it will be presented: as an AI Study Companion app, an AI quiz app or something else);

This process ensures a secure, transparent, and efficient way for data/model owners to monetize their assets and for app developers to utilize these assets within the KIP ecosystem. The integration of SFTs allows for precise tracking and rewarding based on asset usage.

Appendix 3 - Selection Criteria

  • Subject matter expertise e.g. applicant’s qualifications, track record, past experience.
  • Content suitability e.g. whether the content is fit for students
  • Potential Reach of finished course:
  • Overall completeness of the application.
  • Overall Balance of Subject Matters covered by OCU: We aim to have courses that are in Technology, Humanities & the Arts, Business.
  • Geographical base: We aim to be aiding and onboarding applicants from all over the world.
  • Size of applicant’s student base e.g. size of the applicant’s potential student population that will also be onboarded through to access the courses published on OCU
  • Additional factors including the subjects chosen by applicants, and their capability to teach at the academic level selected. The Committee shall also assess the alignment of applicants’ proposals with market dynamics, ensuring their ideas resonated with the evolving needs and preferences of the target audience. The thorough evaluation aimed to uncover each candidate’s potential and determine their suitability for the selection process, driven by the commitment to maintain high standards and make informed decisions.
3 Likes

Personally I’m very excited for the launch of Open Campus U, such an AI powered Education platform will make learning even more exciting, innovative and fun. This proposal is definitely a Yes for the Open Campus community.

2 Likes

I enjoyed reading. OCU is a great plan.

IMHO,
One strange thing is that KIP protocol goes beyond its role of providing their protocol and corresponding tech infra and also acts as an OCU operator.

  1. Isn’t that the role of Open Campus? It would better not to outsource the business itself.

  2. Putting the first question aside,
    I see the biggest reason why KIP protocol is qualified as an operator is because it has cooperated with many excellent educational institutions in the past.
    To better understand KiP’s capabilities, I believe that information such as past cooperation scale, timing and duration, achivement and KIP’s contribution should be provided.
    Can you provide more information or links?

I apologize if my concerns are invalid.

1 Like

Thank you for your question. It’s a very fair question, and am glad you asked.

The team behind KIP had been providing AI services to educational institutions since 2019, and making AI products for those same educational institutions since 2022.

This was some time before we actually started developing Web3 infrastructure for AI. (In fact, We expanded into infra only after trying to make decentralised products and finding, to our surprise, there was no Web3 infra serving AI product guys like us)

Our clients in education included universities (and professors from) like Kings College London, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University, HKU, to name a few. And our work started with providing AI algorithms to crunch data, but progressed since 2022 to being mostly focused around making AI products and tools to help them with their needs. For eg: we have made apps and tools that include:

  1. AI Study Companion for Course Curriculum
  2. Citation Finder Apps / Summariser Apps
  3. Quiz Generators
  4. Research Assistant App for Entire Libraries / Clusters of Books
  5. Grading Guides

The apps you see as part of the OCU demo are actually part of a complete suite of commercially ready Web2 AI apps we had already built for educators, just that we have deployed them into Web3 using KIP Protocol. We plan to roll them out in phases onto OCU as well.

Education is one of 2 core pillars of focus for KIP. The reason is that the use cases of AI in education are extremely obvious, and AI can create value for end users (students and educators) immediately.

It’s a win-win as infra needs products, and products need users.

The OCU plan above is about getting users onto the product platform switfly.

As such OC and KIP are perfectly aligned, and we at KIP plan to inject all of our past connections, knowledge, experience in the tertiary education sector wholly into the OCU product to make it a success for OC, ourselves and the entire OC ecosystem.

2 Likes

thank you sir. We will use AI as a leapfrog strategy to acquire profs and students fast.

3 Likes