Perplexed

A digital university, providing free educational resources, information on ongoing hackathons and competitions, and a community for students to interact and pursue their interests.

According to a recent study by the gates foundation, 45% of students drop their higher education plans due to the high cost associated with attending a university. 

While top universities such as MIT, Stanford, and Harvard offer a plethora of free learning resources, people are still unaware, and even those who is aware drop out of the course without completing it as they find it too overwhelming to start with and there is a lack of interaction. 

Specifically in India, there are multiple small, medium, and even large-scale companies that take advantage of such situations and sell low-quality educational content to people on high profits.

On the other hand, producing fake degree certificates and educational documents has become another normal nowadays. Recently Accenture India fired thousands of employees for their falsified documents. According to a recent study, 72% of employers don’t check the authenticity of their degree, which result in hiring unfit people for a role, putting the whole organization in jeopardy. 

Digital educational platforms and even universities only allow people to choose among the resources associated with them; this not only refrains their people’s choices but limit them in attaining innovative approach to problem-solving through combining cross domains.

Perplexed enables students to be able to learn and have the opportunity to access high-quality educational materials from top universities in a convenient and personalized way by curating their playlists from different universities. This would allow the convenience of having all the materials collected in one place, saving students time and effort in finding and organizing resources on their own.

The high-quality materials are sourced from top universities and carefully curated to provide a comprehensive learning experience. In addition to these resources, Perplexed offers a community platform for students to interact and collaborate. In addition to these resources, Perplexed offers a community platform for students to interact and collaborate.

Key Features:

• Providing NFT tokens (degrees) to students who complete specific courses or achievements on the platform.

• Gathering educational content from top universities around the world.

• Allowing students to interact with each other and form study groups or clubs.

• Holding biweekly events such as lectures, workshops, or hackathons.

• Allowing students to design their courses and share them with the community.

• Providing job opportunities for students to gain practical experience in their field of study.

• Offering a paid subscription feature that gives students access to curated course content for specific subjects sourced from top universities.

The website will provide educational resources, information on hackathons and competitions, and a community platform for students to interact and collaborate. The website will not offer traditional degrees or credits. The paid subscription feature will allow students to access curated course content for specific subjects sourced from top universities.

For anyone who wants to learn, be it a university student or a working individual looking to polish certain skills or just learning for enhancing their knowledge. Perplexed is a digital university that provides free educational resources and information on ongoing hackathons and competitions to students from high school to the post-graduate level and beyond.

Our team is well-positioned to deliver this solution due to our unique combination of skills and experiences.

Vinamra Sharma, as a team lead with a background in computer science and a track record of success in hackathons, has the technical skills and experience necessary to lead the development and execution of our platform. His background in computer science, combined with his experience winning multiple hackathons, including MIT's annual hackathon MakeMIT, demonstrates his ability to think creatively and outside the box to solve complex technical problems.

Srijeeta Srivastav, as a product designer with knowledge of both project design and market strategies, has the skills and experience necessary to guide the user experience and overall design of our platform. Her knowledge of User Interface and experience in the field of product design will be an asset in ensuring that our platform is user-friendly and intuitive for our audience.

Shobhit Bhatt, as a software engineer, has the skills and experience necessary to contribute to the development and maintenance of our platform. His experience in software engineering will be instrumental in ensuring that our platform is well-designed, well-built and scalable.

Our team's life, volunteer, and work experiences have also helped us understand the experiences of our target audience. Our team members have been students themselves and have gone through the same struggles and challenges that our target audience is currently facing, which gives us a unique perspective on the pain points and needs of our audience. This understanding, combined with our technical skills and experience, positions us well to deliver a solution that addresses the needs of our target audience.

We have been working on no profit to provide free educational content to people across the globe for almost one year and eight months now; this helped us to understand the requirement of our target audience. 

Additionally, as a digital university that provides free educational resources and information on ongoing hackathons and competitions to students from high school to post-graduate level, we have taken several steps to understand the needs of the population we want to serve.

1. Research: We have conducted extensive research on the current educational resources available to students and identified the gaps and pain points in the current offerings. We have also researched the current trends and opportunities in technology and innovation to understand the needs of our target audience.

2. Volunteering and working with existing organizations: We have volunteered and worked with existing organizations that provide educational resources and opportunities for students. This experience has given us a deeper understanding of the challenges and needs of our target audience.

3. Engaging potential users: We have engaged potential users, such as students and educators, in the design and development of our solution. We have gathered feedback and input from potential users throughout the design process to ensure that our solution addresses their needs and pain points.

All these steps have helped us to understand the needs of our target population and design a solution that addresses their needs effectively. We continuously gather feedback from users and iterate on our solution to improve it and align it with the needs of our target audience.

We don't create our own content instead, we provide facilitate them to choose from already existing courses from the most prestigious universities available for free and let them curate their own course, with all the material readily available. We also plan on providing NFT tokens, which ensure security and make it impossible to falsify the proof of completion of a particular course. Cohort-based learning also assists in forming a sense of community that helps people keep each other accountable for their daily learning goals.

With Perplexed, we aim to achieve the status of a full-fledged digital university with global reorganization and attention by the end of the year 2024. The impact that we aim to bring is to change the way people learn and allow students from across the globe to design their own courses integrating cross-domains and learning from some of the top openly available educational content in the comfort of their homes. Additionally, they could connect with like-minded people to form their future ventures and solve more significant problems. Our motive includes introducing NFT tokens as a better alternative to degrees so that the falsification of documents will minimize. Apart from this, our key goal is to enable everyone with the education they want to design for themself without any kind of restrictions. 

In terms of our strategy to achieve the targeted impacts, we have defined five major phases and distributed the tasks accordingly:

Phase 1: User/Market Research (Completed)

• We officially started on May 2021, and from then till now, we have been only focusing on extensive market research and understanding what user actually wants by comprehending their difficulties and experience through feedback as well as interactions.

• We have provided different kinds of content/material, such as free course catalogs, hackathons, events, podcasts, and organically written blogs. This helped us to understand what are the likings and dislikings so that now we have a precise analytic on which our current solution is based.

Phase 2: User Acquisition and value proposition development (Undergoing)

• We plan to launch short learning Bootcamps specifically targeting the students, where we will expose them to quality educational content, events, challenges where they can apply their learning, and networking opportunities to build a community of like-minded people.

• These boot camps are designed to allow people to explore various domains. If they have disconnected from learning(Working professionals), this will let them get their form back; if a beginner wants to jump into a new field, this will enable them with the fundamentals. 

• The timeline for the launch of Bootcamps is by March 2023 

Phase 3: Expansion (Upcoming)

• Right six months after the launch of Bootcamps (i.e., September 2023), our plan is to expand in the space and take the first Cohort of learners; here, people would choose and design their own course structure, whereas we will ensure their learnings and provide them with the right growth environment with netowing environment.

• By successfully completing, we will be providing them with NFT as a token of appreciation. 

• We aim to blend both extensive learning and memorable experiences together.

Phase 4: Re-creation (Upcoming)

• Based on the analysis of user feedback and results from the past three phases, we aim to improvise our structure at this point, here we will introduce our meta space to make people learning with us feel more connected and have their lessons in a virtual environment.

• Here, we will additionally plan to include special features for supporting disabled persons and introduce collaborative project space where organizations can put their project and our learners will work to build the systems.

The key technology on which PERPLEXED is based is simple web frameworks, In addition to this, as now we are introducing NFT tokens as an alternative to a degree, we are working to incorporate blockchain. Apart from this to better understand user behavior and recommend specific courses we are working to add a recommender module in the course selection.

The current traffic of our website is roughly 400k people per year, these people are consuming the dictnory of free courses, blogs, information regarding hackathons and workshops. 

For this year 2023, we aim to cross the mark of 700k additioanlly we aim to accomodate people in the discord community to allow more one-to-one connection.

Currently we are having no funds but are only working from past one year to serve the people for free. While on one hand this helped us to better understand their needs and now we are providing them exactly the same in our final product, as we being student it is very hard to mange things with studies. But we all are proud that we did it passing through the times when we were about to give-up.

None, we have been operating by our own till now but have the plan to partner with NGOs and Institutions in near future 

The business model of Perplexed is based on providing free educational resources and a community platform to students, while also offering a paid subscription feature that provides access to curated course content from top universities.

Revenue for Perplexed will come from two main sources:

1. Paid Subscriptions: Students who want to access the curated course content offered through the paid subscription feature will be required to pay a fee on a monthly or annual basis. This fee will be the primary source of revenue for Perplexed.

2. Advertising: Perplexed could also generate revenue by selling advertising space on the website to companies or organizations that want to reach the student audience. This could be done through banner ads or sponsored content.

The business model for Perplexed is based on the idea of providing value to students through a combination of free resources and paid services. By offering high-quality educational materials and a community platform for students to connect with each other, Perplexed can build a loyal user base and generate revenue through subscriptions and advertising.

Our path to financial sustainability is based on a combination of revenue streams. We plan to generate revenue through the following ways:

1. Sponsored content: We will partner with companies and organizations to offer sponsored content on our platform. This will allow us to generate revenue while also providing valuable information and resources to our students.

2. Advertising: We will sell advertising space on our platform to companies and organizations targeting our audience of students and young professionals.

3. Premium resources and services: We will partner with universities and organizations to offer paid access to premium resources and services such as online courses, mentorship programs, and networking opportunities.

4. Event organization: We may also charge a fee for organizing events such as hackathons or competitions and other collaborations.

5. Donations and grants: We will explore opportunities for donations and grants from foundations and other organizations that align with our mission to promote education and innovation.

6. Investment Capital: We will consider the option of raising investment capital to support our growth and expansion.