Interledger.dev - Grant Report #1

Project Update

Our project is progressing really well. Especially on the technical front, we have created a text-based education platform that feels intuitive and immersive. Some of our Web Monetization ideas have also been implemented without any difficulty.

We are right in the middle of of our build with some quality control and further feature improvements left for the platform.

Our main focus over the next few months will be to ramp up the content creation in the platform and working to engage university students.

Progress on objectives

We aimed to achieve 3 major deliverables by the end of the project.

Deliverable 1 : A text-based learning platform

This deliverable is 70% complete. We have an alpha site publicly available at https://interledger.dev

To populate it with test data, we cloned the text content from https://javascript.info/ (available under Creative Commons) which we admire greatly. By the end of the project, we will delete all the external content and replace it with our own original content related to blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Some things that have worked really well:

• The design of the landing page
• Search functionality
• Pathway, course and lesson structure
• Progress Tracking on lesson pages
• Prev/Next pages displayed in sidebars
• Social sharing
• User Profile tracking of lesson completions
• Administrator configuration
• Hosting and deployment
• Basic Web Monetization controlled at a per page level

Some things still being worked on:

• Login errors
• Advanced Web Monetization
• Refactoring of existing features

Now for some screenshots:

Featured Course on Landing Page

Pathway Cards on Landing Page

Footer on all pages

Search Page with results

Login page

Lesson Page

We took extensive care to design the lesson pages well. In the screenshot below you can see some of the key features including:

• In-page navigation
• Prev/Next page navigation
• Course progress bar
• Completion/Bookmark tracking
• Social sharing
• Code higlighting
• Creative Commons licensing per page

Tracking Progress on User Profile

Creator Interface

After exploring many options including our original approach of using Eleventy, we settled on Statamic as the best CMS on which to build out the platform in a way that was easy for learners, creators and administrators.

All lessons are written in Markdown, and Statamic provides a very friendly UI for this.

In addition to the standard content fields, we've made it easy for creators to:

• designate open source content
• list multiple payment pointers per page
• add quizzes
• add prerequisites

Deliverable 2 : Original course content for interledger.dev

In the next half of this project, our focus will shift to creating original course content, specifically courses dedicated to teaching Web Monetization.

We're also working with two new content creators to produce additional original content related to blockchain and cryptocurrency

Deliverable 3 : A Summary Report of the Platform

This will be written up as part of the final report, including evaluating the sustainability of this platform

Key activities

We spent most of our time to date on the design and technical build. The entire site is Web Monetized.

Lesson pages have additionally implemented a version of probabilistic revenue sharing which allows for any number of payment pointers to be associated with each page. This is particularly useful for revenue sharing between multiple content creators or content creators and the platform. Content creators do not require any programming knowledge to write articles or add payment pointers.

In the second part of the project we will also be implementing "Earn as you Learn", a way for Web monetized users to revenue share a small percentage of streaming micropayments as they browse the site.

Communications and marketing

We have conducted outreach to some universities in India to discuss hosting a virtual workshop about Web Monetization. These conversations are progressing, albeit with some challenges due to the pandemic and lockdowns.

Once we have written and uploaded the original content and courses, we will begin more extensive social media marketing as well.

What’s next?

Over the next few months, we intend to complete the technical build and ramp up production of original content. We also want to host a Web Monetization workshop with university students.

We think by the end of this year we will be able to move the site from its current alpha into a beta stage and start onboarding more content creators.

What community support would benefit your project?

One aspect we found challenging is recruitment of content creators who are sufficiently knowledgeable in Web Monetization/Interledger or blockchain/cryptocurrency more generally and willing/able to write well structured educational content.

If there are any community members keen to participate in educational content creation we are always open to kick-start these conversations.