Learn & Earn: How to Boost Learners’ Motivation and Not Run Out of Cash
“The greatest investment a young person can make is in their own education, in their own mind. Because money comes and goes. Relationships come and go. But what you learn once stays with you forever.”
Warren Buffet
One of the biggest problems in online education is motivation.
LetMeSpeak “Learn and Earn” business model helps address this, if not resolve it.
Earning while learning encourages people to study more persistently. Motivation increases, time spent learning grows, learners earn rewards convertible into currency spendable in the real world.
It all sounds great, but does it really work? Who pays for the rewards? Can you make more than you put in? How can we make this business model sustainable long-term, so that we can reinvent education at scale?
Can the Learn and Earn approach really make a difference to how we learn?
Yes, it can.
Practice makes perfect. LetMeSpeak helps you form useful habits for learning. It encourages you to study every day and spend meaningful time doing so. Every time you learn, you get instant gratification in the form of LSTARs rewards.
3 weeks into the learning experience, 80% of Learn and Earn students use the app daily! This compares to 20% for Prepaid Subscription learners and 5% for Free to Play ones (see Figure 1).
Retention is one part of the story. Time spent learning is another. On any given day, Learn and Earn students dedicate 3x the amount of time studying compared to those learning for free.
Who pays for earning in “Learn and Earn”?
In short, less committed learners pay for harder working ones.
Consider gym memberships. Many people buy them, few people end up going to the gym consistently. The people who don’t go, contribute the most to the gym owner’s profits.
Imagine you are a gym owner who wants to maximise physical health of society, rather than his profit. One way to encourage more people to exercise is for you to pay a reward to those who train regularly. Hard working people consistent in their efforts could make back their membership fee, get the health benefits and have more fun in the process!
This is exactly what LetMeSpeak metaverse is about when it comes to online education. We want to help people maximise their potential that comes from being able to speak English.
What economic rewards can you get from learning with LetMeSpeak and can it be more than what you put in?
You can make back the money you put in, and more. In some cases, a lot more.
The exact amount of LSTAR rewards you get for learning depends on 3 things:
- You — consistency of learning, committed time
- NFT Character — rarity, length of visa, level ups
- Economy — number of activated NFTs, behaviour of other users
Check out an indication of daily base LSTAR earnings in Figure 3.
See Figure 4 for the daily base reward rates in USDC assuming exchange rate of 0.03 USDC per LSTAR:
Learners can get up to 50% more in bonus rewards on top of the base level ones. the LetMeSpeak metaverse will give additional rewards for NFT Characters Skills, XP Levels, regular usage and other achievements to stimulate more active and fun learning.
How do we make the Learn and Earn model sustainable long-term, so that we can reinvent education at scale?
First, the core product is fun, engaging and delivers learning outcomes that people want.
Second, the level of LSTAR economic rewards paid out balances with the funds inflow into the metaverse as a whole — even if the number of users stopped growing.
To address the first part, we have a product vision to keep users engaged, help them achieve their target learning outcomes, and inspire them to spend LSTARs in LetMeSpeak metaverse.
We’ve spent more than 2 years getting the product right, before adding the metaverse piece. We’ve helped more than 1.5 million people improve their English for free. Learners on average rate their experience 4.8* out of 5 in iOS AppStore. Last month, more than 500,000 people learnt English for free with LetMeSpeak.
We have a rich roadmap to make LetMeSpeak metaverse more fun, engaging and rewarding. It includes several core directions:
- Enable Learn & Earn with low capital outlay:
- Scholarships
- Renting NFTs
- Buy Now Pay Later for NFTs
2. Add new revenue streams:
- NFT enhancements
- Corporate language learning
- New NFT types (land, properties)
- Advertising / partner placements
3. Integrate new experiences:
- Add new apps (different ways to learn) playable with the same NFT Characters
- Add PvP mechanics
- Introduce on-demand tutoring and language exchange
4. Introduce Philanthropy and giving:
- Enable people and charitable organisations to sponsor those in need to learn English and earn using LetMeSpeak
- Give people an easy way to sponsor their friends and family to learn English with LetMeSpeak
5. Lower barriers to entry for Learn & Earn:
- Make Learn and Earn experience very simple and require zero blockchain knowledge
There are several checks and balances in the Economy design to promote sustainable user growth.
First, the earning capacity of each NFT Character is limited by time. Once activated, each NFT character has an LetMeSpeak Visa expiry date between 120 and 240 days. You also only have 30–40 minutes a day when you earn while learning. If you don’t play on a given day, you forgo the potential earnings on that day.
Second, the level of daily rewards self-adjusts as the ecosystem gets more traction. The adjustment factor to the base level of rewards is called Rewards Multiplier. It incentivises sustainable growth:
Rewards Multiplier = (Assumed equilibrium level of active NFTs / Actual number of active NFTs) ^ 0.25
Assumed equilibrium level of active NFTs is a parameter that determines the number of active NFT Character in LetMeSpeak when the Rewards multiplier equals to 1.
Actual number of active NFTs is the number on NFT Characters with active LetMeSpeak Visa on a given date.
At the moment the Assumed equilibrium level of active NFTs is set to 2,000,000 active NFTs. LetMeSpeak governance token holders will be able to review this number to ensure long-term sustainability of the Economy.
In Figure 3 and 4 above you can see how the Rewards Multiplier affects daily base rewards.
The introductory reward rates will apply up to 11,111 active NFTs. Rewards Multiplier for any number of active NFTs between 11,111 and 50,000 will be fixed at 2.51; after 50,000 active NFTs it will adjust inline with the formula above.
We look forward to creating a sustainable way of solving the main problem of online education — motivation. We can only do it by experimenting, adjusting and working together to get it right.
