I don't have any concrete plans for this at all, but I've been thinking recently that the Bitcoin community desperately needs some high-quality, unbiased online courses, and perhaps bitcointalk.org would be a good place to host such a thing. This is just a brainstorming thread.
Example courses that come to mind:
Introductory cryptocurrency investing
- The main focus would be not getting scammed and not losing all of your money.
- It would be very careful not to endorse any particular sites, investments, or trading methods.
- Overall extremely conservative, to balance out all of the pump around here.
- It might be similar to the sort of material on investor.gov, but less authoritarian (eg. no "only trust SEC-approved things") and with more cryptocurrency focus.
Using English naturally online
- Tips targeted at non-native English speakers for acting naturally online.
Being a constructive bitcointalk.org member
Making money online
- SANE tips for making money, especially for people in less-developed countries. No unwise things like gambling or high-risk investing, and no non-constructive things like spamming the forum with garbage.
Basic cryptocurrency concepts
Accepting Bitcoin payments
Implementing Bitcoin
- A long & advanced course on implementing a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency largely from scratch in Python or another easy language. (Some of my best courses in university had this model, where you're provided a bunch of library code and then you glue it together by writing a few hundred lines for each assignment, at the end of the course getting some sort of complete thing.)
Some different/modified software would be needed. The existing threads structure is not at all suitable. Neither are wiki pages, since they're too easily messed-with. Maybe some suitable online-course software already exists. It'd be cool if the courses were internally gamified a bit, maybe with "achievements" and stuff. And it could be integrated with the main forum, eg. giving you badges on your profile if you completed a course.
A real challenge, which I'm not exactly sure how to solve, would be to keep them up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased. 99.9% of introductory cryptocurrency info on the Internet is basically an advertisement for something, and therefore not very useful. If anyone could create a course and publish it on equal standing with the other courses, then we'd end up with a huge pile of altcoin-pump courses, "how to make money using totally-safe HYIPs", and stuff like that. But if courses are only written by trusted & competent people after significant mod review, then only a limited number of courses could be created, and they'd probably quickly become outdated. Perhaps it'd work to do a github-style pull-request format led by some trustworthy editors. (Github could even be used, though that's pretty difficult to use for people not already familiar with git.)
Thoughts?