mroo

The new face of higher education.

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mroo [Em-roo] is a decentralized micro-university creation platform that allows teachers to build a university according to the direct needs of businesses. mroo connects businesses, teachers and students to bring digital micro-universities to life.

In a world where a crisis causes millions of jobs to be lost, and economies to go down at light-speed, it is time to start building better solutions. At mroo we target education, the foundation of our societies. Our aim is to provide university-level education for everyone. We believe that learning should give you more opportunities and reduce student debts. Universities should prepare sudents for the jobs of the future. We believe that it should not be complicated - get skills, get opportunities and learn with mroo.

Our goal is to prevent certain structural, cultural, civilizational and secular sectors from collapsing, or being on the verge of extinction, due to a lack of imagination to build. We want to help those sectors by building new ways of learning, recruiting, and working using the best technology can offer.

Main Objectives :

  • Secure and guarantee education actors.
  • Bring transparence to all parties.
  • Make education more accessible.
  • Connect education with the real world & business needs.
  • Provide a solution suitable for remote work.

Micro-University

In traditional education, students gather in a place to be locked in several independent, unconnected units called classrooms. These classrooms, or compartments for knowledge transmission, are under a central authority body called the university. The university is a centralized institution that manages everything at the same time. It handles administrative tasks and tuition fees payments, chooses who is entitled to receive education, selects and pays teachers, often processes applications for scholarships and is an important decision maker on the curriculum and all this without consulting the real needs of businesses or our society. In this way we blindly train and educate a generation, without really knowing which professions are actually needed by today's and tomorrow's society.

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The concept of micro-university is very simple, it is based on a decentralized system where universities directly represent self-managed classes using the blockchain. Micro-universities keep the traditional educational structure with a speciality, a curriculum and a real school program.

Philosophy, Art, History, Economy, Theology, Script writing, Political sciences... but also digital curricula, Sound design, Computing, Engineering, Architecture, Drawing... can all be taught at a micro-university. Micro-universities are without central authority and respond directly to the needs of businesses. These businesses are called sponsors, they have a protective and guarantor role.

A micro-university must necessarily connect 3 actors:

Company ⟷ Instructor ⟷ Student

3 interconnected actors.

Actors :
  • Company
  • Instructor
  • Student
Problem:
  • Company: Long and competitive job market, forced to do vague and imprecise targeting.
  • Instructor : Dominance of central educational authority.
  • Student : Expensive fees, lack of support, no guarantee of employment or internship, debts.
Need :
  • Company : Precise targeting of candidates in line with the company's identity and the position to be filled.
  • Instructor : Teaching autonomy, flexibility, stable and guaranteed income.
  • Student: Savings, support, hiring guarantee, security, apprenticeship training, easy credit agreement.
Answer given:
  • Company : Targeting from education, candidates that respond to precise needs.
  • Instructor : Different teaching format (3, 6, 9 months or custom), easy access to become a teacher.
  • Student : Cheaper education, support, job opportunities, work placement in companies, recognized diploma.

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Things to know

Company, Sponsors, Guarantor

Business involvement is crucial in the role of a micro-university and especially on mroo. The company sponsors the micro-university from its inception. The main feature of the sponsorship is the job guarantee offer, which is a secure and reserved job vacancy quota for the students of the micro-university which guarantees them high chances of being recruited as soon as they graduate. The company helps to create, together with the instructors, the education program and strategy for the students, the future employees of the company. This job guarantee offer will be in a contractual form defined by a smart contract on the EOS blockchain. In this way, companies secure and guarantee a micro-university.

Creation of a micro-university.

Requests for creation of a micro-university can only be made with a main instructor. To finalize the request, the micro-university must be sponsored by at least one company. An instructor alone is not enough to create a micro-university and a company alone is not enough either. The speciality and subject of teaching of the micro-university must be correlated with the speciality of the instructor and that of the guaranteed job offer issued by the company.

Sponsor Search

mroo will set up a section dedicated for instructors to find a sponsor company. In this way, micro-universities in the process of applying for sponsorship will be able to search for a sponsor directly on the mroo platform. It may very well be that both the Enterprise party and the Instructor party morally found the micro-university before starting the creation process on mroo, but in both cases, the parties must submit to a contractual agreement.

Curriculum

The courses are between 3 - 9 months. It includes a curriculum morally established by the sponsor and the instructors. They are based on remote learning. Nothing prevents universities from scheduling physical activities outside the mroo platform (library meeting, museum meeting, meeting in a dedicated co-working space, school outing...). Companies will have to carry out remote internships on a carefully programmed schedule, in order to prepare students for remote working and leave non-recruited students with experience in companies in addition to their training, which will have a real value in their diplomas and in the continuation of their career.

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Blockchain

The micro-university is managed by one smart-contract and is linked to the smart-contract(s) of the job offer(s) from the business(es). We deploy those smart-contracts on a blockchain because of the properties associated with this technology. Once deployed, smart-contracts cannot be removed or altered, and there is no need for a central authority to certify this, it is an intrinsic feature of the blockchain technology. Additionally we want to keep a record of the skills acquired by students, and we also want to make sure that those certifications can never be hacked or modified after graduation. Lastly, a blockchain allows us to make actions in a transparent way: the computation of the class ranking cannot be manipulated, and even more important the selection of the student(s) getting the work contract(s) cannot be hacked.

Smart Contract

EOSIO is the platform we use to deploy our smart-contracts. We have to kind of smart-contracts:

  • one per micro-university that holds all relevant information about the micro-university, namely the students, professors, and links to associated work contracts. It keeps track of students progression and after graduation computes the class ranking and select the student(s) getting the work contract(s).

  • one (or more) smart-contract representing a real work contract, with all details such as the salary, the duration of the trial-period, everything you would usually find in a classic work contract. The only difference is that the name of the future employee is left blank until graduation. After graduation, the name of the student getting this work contract will be added and the contract will be complete.

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What it does

mroo lets you manage your micro-university, you can add fellow professors or specialists to create the right curriculum for your students and the business needs you address. You can enroll your students and certify their skills. In addition to a diploma, you bring job offers to your students by partnering with businesses that need specific skills. When the time of graduation comes, the micro-university’s creator is able to close the university and generate the final ranking of students, attributing the work contracts to the top students of the class. All of this automatically and in all transparency.

How we built it

mroo is built using the EOSIO platform for our smart-contracts deployments. To interact with those contracts we use a front-end built with Vue.js and quasar framework.

mroo vs classical universities

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Our Choice

We really wanted to respond to the constraints communicated by block.one. And we chose education. We could have chosen to enter the health field because we saw the word "Covid 19" but the health field is a gladiatorial arena. It's an extremely competitive, expensive and legal field that brings together several financial powers and big industries looking for a miracle solution to repair and relaunch the standard economic machine. We have chosen realism. We choose the long term: Education, the pillar of our civilization that has been abandoned by digital technology and and which is for the moment in the hands of an extremely elitist central education. We must educate the world and raise our general knowledge.

Challenges we ran into

The project is the result of a very intense reflection over a period of 2 weeks. We constantly questioned ourselves to find a real solution that meets the demands of Block.one. Before arriving at mroo, in 2 weeks, we had 5 project proposals (including mroo) : Job search platform for remote work, micro-services platform, smart-contract generation tool for freelance work, environment and health certification . But every time we studied the market for all these proposals they did not correspond to our real expectations and the constraints required to "build", and it was very frustrating. mroo arrived very late, on May 20, 2020. The difficulty is to have searched and found an idea that really meets the constraints of Block.one. The use of Slack, Google Doc, Miro, Smartsheet and Zoom was very useful to exchange and gather our ideas, as we all worked remotely.

What's next for mroo

We are bringing mroo to the next level and will start making partnerships with companies. We will also continue to release updated versions of mroo.

Next steps :

  • UI/UX review
  • diploma issued on blockchain
  • more collaboration functionalities
  • listings of all micro-universities
  • partnerships

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