ICO

Meet the Boss – Exclusive Interview with LiveEdu CEO Dr. Michael J. Garbade

liveedu-Ceo-Michael-J-Garbade

LiveEdu is a decentralized peer-to-peer project learning platform for individuals to improve their job-related skills and knowledge in future technologies.

What makes LiveEdu different is that it doesn’t target the complete beginner; instead, LiveEdu focuses on individuals who already have basic skills but want to improve or learn more about a certain topic (think college students or working professionals).

Rather than focusing on theory, LiveEdu emphasizes the importance of application by using practical projects as a means to teach students to create real, functional products. The platform also provides students useful project files to download and tinker around with to improve their skills even further. Readers should note that LiveEdu is not the exclusive provider of projects taught on the platform. Instead, it acts as a network or platform for content creators to create their own educational projects and monetize that on LiveEdu.

We recently sat down with Dr. Michael J. Garbade, the CEO of LiveEdu to have a chat with him about the project as well as finding out his thoughts and insights.

liveedu logo

Hi, Michael. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us more about yourself and LiveEdu?

I am Michael and founder of LiveEdu. I’m an experienced founder with both business and technical skills. I studied business administration, physics and technology innovation.

First off, why did you decide to use the blockchain in building LiveEdu? What was your thought process behind it?

The LiveEdu network is a classic model that is highly suitable for blockchain smart contract tokenization. The blockchain will decentralize key product development decisions that are made on both the supply and demand side.

Tell us about how you came up with the idea of LiveEdu. Did you face a problem within the online education industry or do you think there is a gap in the market for LiveEdu to fill?

There is no online project learning platform that teaches college students and professionals who have passed the beginner stage how to build complete products. LiveEdu does not target beginners, but those who have more than basic introductory knowledge of a field.

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What do you think is the biggest problem LiveEdu will solve and why is the problem important to solve?

Teaching people practical valuable job skills that are key for future jobs.

While other platforms target the absolute beginners, LiveEdu changes it up a bit by targeting people who already have basic skills in whatever topic they want to learn more about. What is the reasoning behind this and what are the advantages of targeting intermediates and experts instead of complete beginners? Wouldn’t this limit the target audience size of LiveEdu?

Teaching people practical valuable job skills that are key for future jobs

We address the main reason people start learning new skills: building a product. We don’t see Coursera, Udemy or Udacity as competitors; but as potential partners to work with. We see them as customers and distribution partners and plan to syndicate our content to them via our API. Those sites are great for beginners to learn theory and introductory topics. LiveEdu does not provide this, but emphasizes teaching people, who are above the level of these sites, how to build a complete product, e.g a VR Game, an AI Bot, a Bitcoin auto-trader. You could think of Coursera, Udemy, and Udacity as kindergarten and LiveEdu as high school.

Problems that often arise with systems that reward users for their attention is that some people may try to game the system by using bots or other scripts to fake the act of “learning”. How do you prevent frauds from happening or in other words, how do you ensure that people actually spend time on lessons?

Project completion is tracked using the blockchain and also our pending blockchain certificates.

While premium projects are the main focus of LiveEdu, what happens to non-premium projects then? Are they going to be pivoted into something else or will non-premium projects be removed in the future? Are there any plans to add more services or products other than the current offerings?

We will no longer focus on non-premium projects and they will be discontinued. We’re starting with the eight topics: programming, game development, data analytics, design, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and cyber security. Our network will be all opened for all topics in 2019.

liveedu ico education learning network

Other than ensuring that a content creator is actually qualified, what other metrics does LiveEdu has in order to maintain quality in premium projects? Do you also look at things like student achievements or engagement to determine if a premium project is good or not?

Quality assurance moderators

What has been your happiest moment so far working on LiveEdu? On the flipside, what has been the most painful, or perhaps the most regretful decision you’ve made with LiveEdu?

Getting our first 5000 users from Reddit in the first week. Not focusing on a paid product (premium projects) from the beginning.

Is LiveEdu already working with notable businesses or firms? Are there any future partnerships in process? If yes, can you explain briefly about it?

Yes, we will announce them one by one. We don’t want to announce all now.

liveedu features

Tell us more about EDU. What is its function in the platform and why did you choose to use utility tokens instead of moving on with Fiat currencies?

The LiveEdu ecosystem consists of two networks, namely the internal ecosystem and the external ecosystem. The internal ecosystem participants are project creators (content creators), viewers (learners), community moderators, project quality moderators, and LiveEdu API application developers. The external ecosystem participants are businesses, schools, libraries, colleges and other online education companies. LiveEdu is using similar blockchain smart contract mechanics to Steemit. We use EDU blockchain smart contracts in our network for payments and rewards. EDU coins will replace fiat as the main payment method by users for subscriptions and donations. Subscription prices on LiveEdu will be denominated in USD and not EDU units.
Project creators will be rewarded EDU coins as partial compensation for their work. 13% of all coins, minted for the purpose of this ICO, are reserved for them and will be distributed over a 3-year period until all project creator coins are allocated.

Learners on LiveEdu will be rewarded for each positive learning activity they complete. LiveEdu users will be allocated tokens for each quality assurance activity. Quality assurance is important as it improves the user experience for all learners and content creators. EDU coins will be allocated to developers for each application developed on top of the LiveEdu API, once it is deployed and used by at least 1000 end users. The best apps and bots will be endorsed by LiveEdu and shared with all LiveEdu users

liveedu ico project learning

What do you think is the biggest challenge or obstacle LiveEdu will face? How do you plan to tackle that challenge?

The chicken-and-egg problem as elaborated in the white paper. We are solving it with the tokenization like Steemit did.

Moving on to more personal stuff, what does a typical day in your life look like?

Wake up, check Telegram, Trello, and Skype for project updates, check emails. Answer all of them, then I start my own work.

Can you express one personal opinion of yours about the blockchain? It doesn’t matter if it’s negative or positive, we just want to hear your thoughts on it.

The transaction fees suck at the moment.

Finally, what other personal goals (besides your career) do you have in life? Is there anything else in life you want to achieve?

Ha ha, now just focused on our ICO and building LiveEdu with the team.

That concludes our Interview with Dr. Michael J. Garbade

More Interviews to come

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