The problem Fraternity DAO (Web3 University) solves

Most students studying online never finish their course. Students find it difficult to do so due to lack of community, handholding, or mentorship provided in the "offline experience".

Our USP is to provide an excellent "environment" for online studies. Currently we enhance student engagement via features like:

1. non-intrusive video-sharing of others studying the same content right now.
2. showing avatars of your connections who have completed this chapter.
3. ability to ask a live question, and be notified in real-time if someone answers it.
4. ability to chat with others in the same community.
5. ability to earn a scholarship / income by helping others (being 'proxy teaching assistant') and getting rewarded in $FRAT - this is especially valuable for the millions of Tutors in India finding it difficult to sustain in the era of video-based education.
6. having live events like open book exams, hackathons, job fairs to keep up student interest

We are a Web3 version of Udemy, but we provide a superior product: we present a more "social experience", have better integration with answers, and almost all our content is FREE, youtube-based and crowdsourced for now. We are a DAO which rewards users / authors / tutors for contributions: adding, editing content, having live sessions, helping peers with answers etc.

Currently the courses are all 'public' courses - in which any creator can contribute and add content, upload videos etc. - this results in ONE course with multiple authors, and the content being excellent in EVERY section. Such FREE courses act as a magnet to pull masses of students, and help build reputation of authors, as well as get them rewards for contributions.

In future, we aim to launch paid 'private' courses - created by single authors, just like the ones that exist at current EdTech sites. This specialized content + focused communities will be a great value add to students.

We earn from advertising and commissions on private course sales.

Challenges I ran into

The challenge we ran into was about "how much" to depend on decentralization technologies for now.

1. The core responsibility of the Fraternity is to assess user contributions and reward them fairly. Currently, no automation can fulfill the role of assessing the 'value add' by a contribution, and it must be done manually after careful consideration. Thus, we run into issues of dispute-resolution and transparency.

2. Our focus is mass adoption, and our target audience of students is not well versed with logging in via metamask or other wallets. So we decided to use traditional Web2 technologies and an email-based login system to keep things easy to onboard users. Thus, we ran into the issue of "what to decentralize" if we were to depend on traditional Web2 tech.

We got over both these issues by becoming a Polygon-based DAO, and providing blockchain-based transparency for the following:

1. Letting creators have 100% transparency over user data ( **every video uploader can see which users saw the video, which users liked the video, 'private' course owner gets the data of the users ** )
2. Providing 100% transparency regarding contributions.
3. Rewarding contributors with $FRAT governance token. (to be done manually after decision is taken in DAO about how much $FRAT to reward)
4. Provide a forum where issues are addressed transparently, so contributors can be assured of getting long-term value, so they can become actively involved with the project

2 months back, we submitted in Solana India's hackathon. Link: https://devfolio.co/submissions/fraternity-7da9

1. Under development then, no award was won
2. We have re-used some chat and questions logic, the promo video, and some animations.
3. Completely new: ~95% code done in this hackathon (verifiable via github commits): entire Vue Component design, WebRTC video sharing, admin panel, logs system, most site content.
4. We are a now an established Polygon-based DAO with live product, real content, and real users.