A DESIGN OF COMPLEMENTARY COMMUNITY
CURRENCIES FOR EDUCATION
Josep Lluis de la Rosa, Joan Batlle, Elisabet Batlle
University of Girona, Campus de Montilivi, E17071 Girona, Catalonia, Spain
GoodGrades.us, Tech Incubator, Everton, IL 60201, U.S.A.
Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Mukkai Krishnamoorthy
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 118, 8
th
Av., Troy, New York, U.S.A.
Keywords: Complementary Community Currencies, Wits, Rewarding, Education Community.
Abstract: This paper proposes a design for complementary community currencies for education communities to boost
cooperation of the more advanced students with the less advanced ones. Its design follows two goals:
motivating students to learn by doing extra homework (effort) and share knowledge with younger students
(tutoring), and shifting the role of teachers towards a more supervisory, tutoring and dynamic tasks. The
hypothesis, following a Brazilian example, is that colleges may accept as payment for their tuitions not only
conventional legal currencies, but also educational complementary currencies. The traditional grants
policies based on personal effort will be paid with bunnies, and modern community tutoring effort will be
paid with knowls. The bunnies and knowls will be obtained as a reward of doing homework and providing
help for homework, respectively, and as an expected result, students will have more solid knowledge
background at all levels resulting from their boosted personal and community effort.
1 INTRODUCTION
Education has challenging problems beyond the well
known ones of funding and methodology. The lack
of motivation of the younger generations raises high
up above them; students see no relevance in what is
done in the school except for “good grades meaning
good colleges”. Several on-line communities try to
deal with this problem presenting initiatives that
resulted for example in high interaction and
outstanding results in complex mathematical
problems, involving pre-college students. The
drawback is that these communities are not
connected to each another. Thus, it is conceivable to
connect them with expectation of boosting teachers’
role of helping their students to learn and make
academic progress.
Another problem is that teachers, burden with
heave teaching load, rarely participate in innovation
forums, do not take into account the modern student
incentivization tools (for example, on-line games),
and as the result, they have no time to address the
problem of students seeing no relevance for their
lives in what is done in school.
The current state of the art solutions attempt to
increase the intrinsic motivation of students. Some
solutions today are related to paying students for
their academic progress, with either legal currency
or complementary community currency that can be
used towards college or university tuition. Other
approaches are also increasing the intrinsic
motivation of students by creating a strong sense of
elitist community, like on-line communities. There
are many other approaches, but we will keep focus
on those, will discuss their pros and cons and will
propose improvements to them.
The key fact is that the best students are some sort
of insiders, who know the subject and also know
how to motivate less advanced and/or younger
students. Last, but not least, the universities, by
allowing students to pay tuition with complementary
community currencies, are promoting the good will
as well as recruiting good students. At the same time
the University will help with social services in the
educational community and will benefit the students
410
de la Rosa J., Batlle J., Batlle E., Szymanski B. and Krishnamoorthy M. (2009).
A DESIGN OF COMPLEMENTARY COMMUNITY CURRENCIES FOR EDUCATION.
In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 410-414
Copyright
c
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who share their knowledge. Universities may hope
also that the state will reimbursement them for the
lost tuition income as some sort of a tax-payers’
payback based on the public benefit of the scheme.
2 PREVIOUS WORK
Some precedent systems paying for sharing
education have been already proposed. According to
(O’Brien, 2008), the Baltimore schools
Superintendent, Andres Alonso, unveiled a
controversial proposal to improve city schools: pay
students to perform. It's a simple idea that has
generated quite a bit of controversy from purists
who cringe at the thought of paying students to learn
and from realists who believe there simply must be a
more effective way to spend $1 million in a failing
school system. Yet despite moral and practical
objections, this approach does have a record of
success abroad. What's more, there may be a way to
tweak Mr. Alonso's plan so that it reinforces - rather
than undermines - the value of learning and enables
the city to earn a greater return on its investment.
Paying people to do what they should be doing,
such as working hard in school, may seem like
absurd policy, but this approach, as claimed by
(Lietaer, 2006) is proving to be an effective tool for
fighting poverty in the developing world.
"Conditional cash transfer" programs, as they are
known in the international development community,
have increased health and education outcomes for
impoverished families around the globe, from Brazil
and Argentina to Mozambique, Cambodia and
Pakistan. Perhaps the best-known such program,
Mexico's Progresa, pays parents cash in return for
forfeiting the wages their child could earn and
instead keeping him or her in school. Not
surprisingly, children of families enrolled in
Progresa are much more likely to stay in school and
acquire the skills they need for the high-wage jobs
that can lift an entire family out of poverty.
Progresa's success inspired New York Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg to implement the first
conditional cash transfer program in US. Launched last
year, Mr. Bloomberg's Opportunity NYC is a privately
funded demonstration project that offers cash payments
to low-income workers who meet certain benchmarks,
such as opening a bank account or meeting with
teachers to discuss a report card. Early feedback from
the program suggests that these transfers aren't simply a
cash bonus; for many, they serve to replace the wages
lost when a parent leaves work to meet with his or her
child's teacher.
Mr. Alonso's proposal to pay students to perform
draws ire from those who believe our instant-
gratification culture has infiltrated every corner of
society; no longer are students compelled to learn for
learning's sake, or to achieve in the hope of securing a
better future. The critique that these payments for
passing send the wrong message to students is potent
enough for Baltimore to reconsider how it structures
and frames its program.
In our opinion, first, the city should split the
payment by handing one part directly to the student and
deposit the rest into a restricted savings account that
can be used only to pay for higher education or skills
training. The straight payment would give the city the
instant results it seeks, while directing the savings to an
account in the child's name would reinforce the
expectation that passing the state assessment test is just
one step in the journey to achieving a postsecondary
credential and, with it, a better life. As a bonus, such a
solution helps provide these students - those who work
hard to achieve – with the financial boost they need to
continue their education.
The program is thus transformed from a bribe for
kids to past tests to a vehicle for students to chart a path
to higher education through building academic skills
and earning their college scholarship.
According to (O’Brien, 2008), the Bloomberg’s
claim was: “We’ve reached a breakthrough agreement
establishing a new program that will reward excellent
performance by individuals and by entire schools.”
Mayor Bloomberg also said: “We are rewarding our
teachers who prove that they are the most successful in
helping students make academic progress”.
We claim that this approach has another problem
resulting from the use of legal currencies that are not
appropriate for certain types of communities like
education-centered ones, since these communities may
have other values.
For example, online communities blossom
around specific subjects. Some examples are the art
of problem solving www.artofproblemsolving.com,
the Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles,
www.cut-the-knot.org, and the Maths Forum @
Drexel mathforum.org. They represent different
approaches to attracting highly motivated high level
students that love maths and enjoy exchanging
solutions. These communities have strong
community sense. From our point of view, they are
disconnected from the less advanced students, who
do not benefit from this excellent collective source
of knowledge. This paper is an attempt to provide a
framework for connecting these communities with
regular students and teachers.
In some sense there is a solution: it is the saber of
Bernard Lietaer (Lietaer, 2006). This is an alternative
rewarding system that helps students to achieve access
A DESIGN OF COMPLEMENTARY COMMUNITY CURRENCIES FOR EDUCATION
411

to colleges and at the same time incentivize the
advanced students to teach the beginners. The main
social goal of saber project is to multiply the number of
students that can afford to obtain a college-level
education in Brazil. The additional goals are having a
direct impact on the entire primary and secondary
school learning potential, as well as improving the
cross-generational and social awareness of the kids that
will go to college. To avoid stagnation, they apply a
20% yearly inflation (or tax) on accumulated sabers, so
that advanced students have an incentive to have a plan
to be in college at a certain year. The discount rate
applied for the tuition is 1 saber = 1 riai (the official
currency in Brazil).
Finally, and far from being educational
applications, there are the question-answer
communities like yahoo answer, were the rewarding is
based on simple points, but has attracted the attention
of several hundreds of thousand users with about
70.000 questions posted every day. The question –
answer approach may fit well with educational
communities, and part of their incentivization schemas
may adapt to them. In the on-line communities, people
look for status, raising high in the ranking system, with
predefined reward tables sorted according to their
activity. Apparently, it is something that they enjoy
(Howe, 2008). A problem that these communities have
is that most of the most active users love to help, but do
not like or need to be helped, making the points in their
accounts not too useful.
3 GOAL
The challenge is to find a way to connect students
and teachers so that collectively they act more
intelligently than any individuals or groups have
ever done before.
The goal is to incentivize students and teachers
with intrinsic motivations, by a strong sense of
community. This will be done by designing a special
currency, whose unit will be called Wit and will be
issued under highly controlled conditions as
explained below. Its face value would be nominally
the same as the legal currency of countries in which
they are earner (i.e., Euros, Dollars, etc), and would
be redeemable either for paying tuition for higher
education programs in participating universities or
for other benefits inside the educational community.
The balance among the convertible value of the new
currency is the key for achieving the motivation of
students and teachers. This would be a paper
currency (although electronic accounts can be kept
where they will accumulate), with all the security
precautions against fraud used for printing
conventional national currency.
The proper design of the Complementary
Community Concurrencies (CCC) is critical, since
as (Krohn and Snyder, 2008) states, eighty-five
percent of the local paper currency systems (a type
of CCC) initiated in the United States since 1991
have become inactive. This is discussed in the
following section.
4 A PROPOSAL OF
COMPLEMENTARY
COMMUNITY CURRENCIES
FOR EDUCATION
Following (Carrillo et al., 2007), we proposed to
introduce a new general class of currency called
wits. The name intends to invoke the meaning of
“things that make sense”. Any student that makes
things that make sense to somebody else in his/her
educational community will be rewarded with wits.
The reward can be granted either for progress
towards obtaining higher grades or for involvement
with the community in the form of helping other
students. The payment can be issued by the
students’ parents or by public authorities. Teachers
simply help students to advance themselves
according to their goals. The redemption of their
wits into real things may vary from exchanging
them for tuition for colleges to exchanging for
money or even for attaining certain roles in their
communities. The rewarding will be always done
from a meritocratic point of view. The educational
community self-control will apply, so any fakes will
be fixed inside the community itself.
Accordingly, we propose two different kinds of
wits, as complementary currencies inside the
educational communities:
• Bunnies, the first type of wit, will be a measure of
individual progress as long as students succeed
doing exercises. The bunnies may be also credited
to parents when they are helping teaching their
children and, when necessary call for help. They
will be used by the students at the end of the term
to redeem age-specific rewards of any type,
according to the desires of students under the
constraints set up by parents. The rewards are
subject to achieving certain goals agreed by the
parents and the educational community. Students
start with zero Bunnies at every term. Bunnies are
lost whenever a student quits the educational
community though they might be given to other
students at any given moment, or can be divided at
the end of the term among the best students.
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•
Knowls, the second type of wit, is the currency
that is assigned every term to students to reward
tutors, advanced students or even other parents for
their efforts to help students do and understand
their homework. Knowls are assigned as a loan to
every student that joins the community, which
means that any student can use them to reward any
other student or tutor for their help. The knowls
are redeemable primarily for college grants,
though, other usages may apply. For example
converting knowls into bunnies may be allowed at
the exchange rate yet to be determined. Before
redeeming knowls for tuitions or bunnies, the
loans have to be paid back.
These types of wits can be divisible by 100 to
facilities precise pricing. We expect that the prices
for personal progress and community contributions
will be self-regulated by the educational community
itself, by sort of an invisible hand.
4.1 Educational Viability of Bunnies
and Knowls
There are some examples (Threadless, iStockPhoto,
Fotózz, etc.) that led us to believe that our learning
community will benefit from crowd-sourcing, by
taking advantage of the over-education of middle
class making our interests more diverse than our
business cards would have us to believe (Howe,
2008). A confluence of factors contributed to a
sudden creative abundance for teaching. An
exponential rise in education has coincided with the
emergence of the greatest mechanism of distributing
knowledge the world has ever seen, the Internet. But
this diversely talented, highly skilled workforce
must toil away in a labor market that requires ever
greater degrees of specialization. This leaves people
feeling overeducated and under-fulfilled, with job
satisfactions rates reaching all-time lows. Thus, the
ones who can teach can be advanced students, as
well professionals interested in sharing their specific
knowledge, housewives with high degrees but no
paid jobs, and others.
Motivations in the communities fall into extrinsic
and intrinsic categories. We can think of extrinsic
motivation as consisting of carrots (a financial
reward) and sticks (a scolding from your boss).
Intrinsic motivations, on the other hand, consist of
such factors as creative fulfillment, a belief in the
project, the sense of community obligations, or the
opportunity to enhance one’s reputation in that
community.
People are inspired to contribute to crowd-
sourcing endeavors for similar motivations, though
financial incentives also play a role, especially when
the contributors hail from developing countries.
However, people derive enormous pleasure from
cultivating their tales and from passion on what they
have taught others. Collaboration, in the context of
crowd-sourcing, has its own reward (Howe, 2008).
Fotózz (see Table 1. for some basic facts), an
educational community in the field of photography,
has rewarding schemes with some similarities to the
concepts proposed in this paper. In Fotózz, there are
over 40.000 users very motivated to learn and highly
active in posting photos and writing reviews, so that
users learn by doing. A participant sees others’
photos and reviews, so that she understands deeply
herself her own progress in photographic abilities.
This community has a credit system quite similar to
the complementary community currency proposed
here, where every user receives some credits for
every review made. A participant can use earned
credits for publishing new photos, showing his
progress or experimental work. If a user runs out of
credits, then she cannot publish any picture until she
reviews a sufficient number of other authors’ photos.
This is a powerful ‘carrot’ incentive.
Table 1: Features of Fotózz and Wikipedia communities.
Fótozz Data obtained Oct 30, 2008 from Oct 1, 2003
43.181 users
147.813 active photos
1.646.372 reviews (hungarian)
0,43% of the total population of Hungary
3,4 photos per user
38,1 reviews per user
Wikipedia (data obtained from en.WikiChecker by Oct 30, 2008)
8.176.196 users
75.000 editors (hihgly active users)
2.606.566 articles (english)
260.875.565 edits
0,20% of the total population in english
0,3 articles per user
31,9 edits per user - Note that edits are of lower magnitud
e
16,0 reviewed edits per user (estimation)
The cumulative mass of credits of the whole
community steadily grows with the level community
activity. Also the quality of the photos of the whole
community steadily grows, despite a steady flow of
people joining or quitting it. Fotózz shows a stable
process of teaching done by advanced users to the
benefit of beginners that love learning. Interestingly,
this community is by far more active than the
Wikipedia committee is. Just as a matter of
comparison with the most known educational
community today, we provide interesting statistics
for Fotózz and Wikipedia in Table 2. As shown
there, Fotózz members contribute 10 times more
entries than the wikipedians do mainly because of
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5 FUTURE WORK
the different nature of entries on those sites. What it
is relevant is that they are twice as many Fotózz
members as there are wikipedians, measured by the
ratio of active users to their linguistic base
(Hungarian and English), as well as twice the
number of entries per user. This means that Fotózz
community is highly attractive and by far much
more active than the wikipedian community.
This is a concept of yet another application of
knowledge backed complementary community
currencies (wits), in the roadmap to citation auctions
(de la Rosa and Szymanski, 2007). We are looking
for many uses of wits (Carrillo et al., 2007) in
preparation to their general introduction not only in
the Internet 2.0 communities but also in other
knowledge intensive communities. We expect to
build up communities that love teaching and
learning by doing, where users generate, review and
distribute the contents.
The learning community may work equally well
as the Fotózz community does, imposing a set of
social norms of behavior on their constituents,
offering rewards in the form of enhance reputation,
and conforming to those norms or excelling at skills
that the community considers valuable.
In future work, we will test the concept in on-line
educational communities, initially in those devoted
to helping students to do their homework, as well as
helping parent to help their children to do the
homework. Examples of such communities are
Notemari.ro in Romania, a New York State
educational community like GoodGrades.us, as well
as a charter school.
The users of Fotózz love learning, and they learn
a lot by doing, sharing, and reviewing until they
reach the time they feel they must quit the
community to follow perhaps a professional career
with the high credits and skills that they
accomplished during their community residence.
This virtuous process may also arise in an
educational community that uses educational
complementary currencies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Table 2: Comparison of Fotózz and Wikipedia
communities.
Ratios Fótozz Wikipedia
Fótozz
/Wikipedia
Users/population
0,43% 0,20% 210%
Publications per user
3,4 0,3 1074%
Reviews per user
38,1 16,0 239%
Reviews per user (rough)
38,1 31,9 119%
This research is partially funded by the European Union
project Nº 216746 PReservation Organizations using
Tools in AGent Environments (PROTAGE), FP7-2007-
ICT Challenge 4: Digital libraries and content and the
PR2007-0432 Salvador de Madariaga Grant.
4.2 About the Currency Redemption
and the Exchange of Knowls and
Bunnies
REFERENCES
Rourke O'Brien, 2008. Paying City Students is a Wise
Investment, New America Foundation, The Baltimore
Sun June 27, 2008
Colleges in the USA and other countries may decide
to accept students pay with knowls to gain students
with strong community services and solid
knowledge demonstrated by their teaching. This
already happened in Brazil, with the saber
complementary currency (Lietaer, 2006), where
every family receives 200 saberes per newborn child
in order to pay his/her education. The final
redemption, at the moment of paying a college
tuition is 1 saber = 1 riai (legal currency in Brazil).
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2008/
paying_city_students_wise_investment_7445
Bernard Lietaer, 2006. A Proposal for a Brazilian
Education Complementary Currency, Intl Journal of
Community Currency Research. Vol 10, pp 18-23.
Gregory A. Krohn, Alan M. Snyder 2008. An Economic
Analysis of Contemporary Local Currencies in the
United States, International Journal of Community
Currency Research, Vol. 12, pp. 53-68.
de la Rosa J. Ll., Boleslaw K. Szymanski 2007., Selecting
Scientific Papers for Publication via Citation Auctions,
IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 16-20.
Other colleges may accept students paying with
bunnies that demonstrate high personal effort and
solid working background of the payers.
Carrillo C., de la Rosa J. Ll., and Canals A. 2007.,
Towards a Knowledge Economy, Intl Journal of
Community Currency Research, Vol. 11, pp. 84-97.
Some colleges may accept both currencies, what
might set, as a matter of fact, the conversion rate
between bunnies and knowls. From this point of
view, conversions between bunnies and knowls
should be allowed inside the community under
certain conversion rates.
Howe, J. 2008., Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the
crowd is driving the future of business, Crown
Business, First Edition.
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