Interledger.dev — Final Grant Report

Project Update

Our project is complete. We have built an intuitive and immersive text-based technical education platform from scratch. It has a range of pedagogic tools built in to assist learners and creators. It is now Web Monetized with both basic and advanced features, including our signature implementation of Earn As You Learn.

Progress on objectives

This is a recap of all the features and content we have implemented throughout the project, some of which were previously highlighted in Report 1 and some of which are newly deployed.

Deliverable 1 : A text-based learning platform

We have hit 100% of the goals for this deliverable with the full site live at https://interledger.dev/

Some things that have worked really well and were already in place in October 2021:

• 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 that were being worked on and are now in various stages of completion:

Login errors
We found that while all our social logins worked smoothly in testing we faced a series of minor OAuth API errors when moving to production.

Some of these have been resolved (Github and Google), while others are awaiting a response from the social login provider's support team. These errors are minor in terms of technical complexity but limit the user experience until fully resolved.

Advanced Web Monetization
We are really happy to announce that our Earn As You Learn implementation is now working. By allowing logged-in users to save a payment pointer in their user profile, and then injecting this payment pointer into a lesson page via probabilistic revenue sharing we have implemented a basic form of sharing revenue between creators and consumers.

Refactoring of existing features
We tidied up a lot of the UI/UX bugs as well as some backend code to make the site more performant and user friendly. We did find a minor bug with loading image URLs from our Amazon S3 folders in the creator interface. While we have a temporary manual workaround, we are refactoring this code to permanently solve this issue.

Screenshots (some old, some new)
Older screenshots are available in Report 1

Our Earn As You Learn feature is showcased here:

Each logged-in user profile now has a field to store the user's payment pointer:

And on each lesson page, the user's payment pointer is injected in on a probabilistic revenue share basis as they browse the site:

Deliverable 2 : Original course content for interledger.dev

This goal is 100% complete but proved a challenging exercise. We successfully onboarded a few external content creators who were willing to try out the education platform and provide new content.

However, with the end of the year fast approaching our creators only managed to create a small amount of new content with more expected over the holidays.

While we have created new content, this is an area for us to keep improving and scaling as we onboard more content creators and fully build out our content models into complete courses and pathways. This will be our main focus in 2022.

Some of the new content includes:

A lesson on creating a testnet wallet for XRPL-PY.

An introductory guide to using centralised exchanges

Deliverable 3 : A Summary Report of the Platform

This grant report serves as the final summary report for our platform. Overall, we take away the following experiences and lesson:

• We accurately predicted the timeline and workload required for a full Web Monetized build of an education platform
• We completed our technical build to a high standard and completed our education content creation to a medium standard
• We learnt that shifting our technical build from test environments to production can break features and deployments and need to consider this phase better in future
• We learnt that creating a community of technical content creators is a significant exercise and we need to spend time nurturing and developing a content pipeline in 2022 so that we can scale and move the platform from content (as opposed to technical) alpha to content production.

Key activities

We spent the bulk of our time on the technical build and are extremely happy with our progress.

We learnt a lot about content creation and the need for a time budget and pipeline engineering for this aspect that is separately as complex (or more complex) than the technical build.

As a bonus, one creator requested feature we were able to implement on each lesson is the implementation of basic multiple choice quizzes to test and reinforce learners' understanding and retention of material.

Communications and marketing

This is an area where we spent a good portion of our time but did not succeed as well as we wanted to.

Our original plan was to approach universities in Australia and the United States to incorporate some of our learning material into a university lecture or seminar. The impact of the pandemic and university closures meant that this was no longer possible.

We then kick-started negotiations with an Indian higher education institute to conduct an in-person full day session with students from an Art College. While we managed to come up with a skeleton programme and generated interest from the faculty, this too did not eventuate.

The reasons for this included the pandemic and the fact that the technical material about Web Monetization, blockchain and cryptocurrencies was not immediately relevant to this student group.

Draft schedule for planned university event with Rabindra Bharati University (did not proceed)

Overall, we learnt that we need to refine our communication and marketing strategies and start to build a strong user community in order to reach more learners and scale our platform.

What’s next?

In 2022, we are going to move our platform fully into production with a focus on content creation. We intend to seed a base level of original technical content about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and various ledger related technologies.

We have a marketing partnership with Aquarelle which is building out an NFT dashboard, gallery and gaming experiences, and hope to contribute and gain a stronger community presence as a result.

We are committed to continuing our build and experimenting with new approaches as this is a growing space with limitless potential over the next decade or two.

What community support would benefit your project?

We would love any feedback or to explore any partnerships with related and relevant projects in the space.

Additional comments

One area we have been considering as a limitation to commercialising Web Monetization is the low brand recognition and small revenue return in the broader Web3 space.

This makes it difficult for creators to implement Web Monetization as more than a sandbox experiment as it is not commercially viable in itself.

While it is an interesting supplement or complement to other monetization strategies, we are hopeful that with the advent of Rafiki, the growing presence of Coil, and more general Interledger adoption that this is a space to watch in the next few years as more opportunities become available.